World Models and Model-Based RL Reading List

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

Learning a model of the environment and planning inside it. From Dyna to modern latent-space world models.

1. Integrated Architectures for Learning, Planning, and Reacting Based on Approximating Dynamic Programming
   Sutton. ICML 1990.
2. World Models
   Ha and Schmidhuber. NeurIPS 2018.
3. Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination
   Hafner et al.. ICLR 2020.
4. Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models
   Hafner et al.. arXiv 2023.
5. Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models
   Sekar et al.. ICML 2020.
6. Temporal Difference Learning for Model Predictive Control
   Hansen et al.. ICML 2022.
7. Transformers are Sample-Efficient World Models
   Micheli et al.. ICLR 2023.
8. Objective Mismatch in Model-based Reinforcement Learning
   Lambert et al.. L4DC 2020.
9. When to Trust Your Model: Model-Based Policy Optimization
   Janner et al.. NeurIPS 2019.
10. Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels
    Hafner et al.. ICML 2019.