Transformers for Sequential Decision Making Reading List

Curated by Mouhssine Rifaki | Stanford Electrical Engineering | Last updated August 2026

Applying attention mechanisms and sequence models to reinforcement learning and control.

Transformers for Sequential Decision Making: 10 key papers

1. Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling
   Chen et al. arXiv 2021.
2. Offline Reinforcement Learning as One Big Sequence Modeling Problem
   Janner et al. arXiv 2021.
3. Stabilizing Transformers for Reinforcement Learning
   Parisotto et al. arXiv 2019.
4. A Generalist Agent
   Reed et al. arXiv 2022.
5. Multi-Game Decision Transformers
   Lee et al. arXiv 2022.
6. Online Decision Transformer
   Zheng et al. arXiv 2022.
7. Q-learning Decision Transformer: Leveraging Dynamic Programming for Conditional Sequence Modelling in Offline RL
   Yamagata et al. arXiv 2022.
8. Prompting Decision Transformer for Few-Shot Policy Generalization
   Xu et al. arXiv 2022.
9. Can Wikipedia Help Offline Reinforcement Learning?
   Reid et al. arXiv 2022.
10. Bootstrapped Transformer for Offline Reinforcement Learning
    Wang et al. arXiv 2022.

Related reading lists

• Diffusion Models for Decision Making
• Efficient Transformers
• In-Context RL & Prompting
• Offline Reinforcement Learning
• Robust & Risk-Sensitive RL
• Behavioral Cloning & Offline Imitation
• Off-Policy Evaluation & Offline Evaluation
• Time Series Forecasting & Temporal Models