Intrinsic Motivation

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Overview

In reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivation gives agents internal reasons to explore and learn when external rewards are sparse or absent. Common signals include novelty and state coverage, prediction error and learning progress, information gain, entropy, and empowerment. Researchers use these signals to train skills and world models, guide exploration in robotics and multi-agent systems, and support active learning. A central challenge is distinguishing useful, learnable novelty from noise while balancing broad coverage against focused, safe exploration that helps with downstream tasks.

Latest papers

CardsList

39 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, down 17% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Multi-Horizon Future Discovery for Physics-Informed Exploration

    Oct 26, 2026Shuwei Wang, Qiang Guan, Brian Qiu +5RL ExplorationIntrinsic Motivation

    University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +2

  2. Intrinsic Goals for Autonomous Agents: Hierarchical Exploration Captures Future Volitional Action in Drosophila

    Oct 25, 2026Declan Kutscher, Reece Keller, Alyn Kirsch +2Intrinsic MotivationIntrinsic Reward Methods

    Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park · Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University · Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University +1

  3. Productive State-Space Exploration for Multi-turn RL in LLM Agents

    Oct 19, 2026Mohammed Haroon Dupty, Yong Liang Goh, Song Guo +1RL for LLM AgentsRL Exploration

    Institute of Advanced Computing and Intelligence, A*STAR · School of Computing, National University of Singapore

  4. Measuring Empowerment from Offline Data for Intrinsically Motivated Exploration

    Oct 17, 2026Ishir Garg, Vivek Myers, Qiyang Li +3EmpowermentRL Exploration

    UC Berkeley · Princeton University

  5. Learning to See through Action: Predictive Curiosity for Robots

    Oct 9, 2026Stelios Zarifis, Panagiotis Filntisis, George Retsinas +1Self-Supervised Visual Representation LearningActive Vision for Robot Manipulation

    HERON - Hellenic Robotics Center of Excellence, Athena Research Center, Greece · Institute of Robotics, Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece · National Technical University of Athens, School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Greece

  6. A Unified Framework for Empowerment and Predictive Control

    Oct 2, 2026Wooyoung Chung, Tristan Shah, Volodymyr Makarenko +1EmpowermentModel Predictive Control

    Department of Computer Science, Whitacre College of Engineering, Texas Tech University.

  7. Bellman Meets Lyapunov: Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning via Mastering Chaos

    Oct 1, 2026Tristan Shah, Wooyoung Chung, Volodomyr Makarenko +2Reinforcement LearningIntrinsic Motivation

    Texas Tech University · Purdue University

  8. Intrinsic Motivation in Reinforcement Learning: A Research Agenda for Adaptive Self-Organisation

    Sep 15, 2026Anatoly BelikovIntrinsic MotivationIntrinsic Reward Methods

    SingularityNET Foundation

  9. Artificial Id: Drive and Persistent Alignment in Agentic AI

    Sep 10, 2026Yakov Pyotr ShkolnikovAI AlignmentIntrinsic Motivation

    Independent Researcher

  10. Application of curiosity driven exploration methods for hardware interference identification

    Sep 8, 2026Ludovic Matar, Clement Moulin-Frier, Christophe Marabotto +2Intrinsic Motivation

    Flowers AI & CogSci Lab - National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, Bordeaux, France

  11. SUN: Reaching for Novelty in Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 8, 2026Wenyan Yang, Arsenii Mustafin, Dominik Baumann +2Intrinsic MotivationRL Exploration

    Aalto University · Tampere University

  12. DynCur-Geo: Dynamic Curiosity Reward Shaping for Multimodal Active Geo-Localization

    Aug 19, 2026Yiming Sun, Yang Zhang, Pengfei ZhuUAV NavigationReward Shaping

    School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China

  13. tinyDSM: A Framework for Skill Modeling and Development for Resource-Constrained Millirobots

    Aug 18, 2026Markus Kobelrausch, Michael Miedler, Axel JantschRobot Skill LearningIntrinsic Motivation

    Institute of Computer Technology, TU Wien, 1040 Vienna, Austria

  14. Exploration-Driven Personalized Federated Reinforcement Learning via Intrinsic Motivation

    Aug 11, 2026Md Rafid Islam, Rafsan Jany, Zahid Hasan +1Federated RLIntrinsic Motivation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering North South University Dhaka, Bangladesh · Digital Health Research Division Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine Daejeon, South Korea · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Alabama in Huntsville Huntsville, AL, USA

  15. S3: Stable Subgoal Selection by Constraining Uncertainty of Coarse Dynamics in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 21, 2026Kshitij Kumar Srivastava, Kshitij JerathHierarchical RLIntrinsic Motivation

    University of Massachusetts, Lowell United States

  16. Intelligence from Learnable Novelty

    Jul 20, 2026Yanbo Zhang, Michael LevinNovelty SearchIntrinsic Motivation

    Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, Medford, MA, 02155, USA · Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

  17. A framework for single and multi-agent human-AI curiosity ecosystems

    Jul 7, 2026Ilya E. MonosovAI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryIntrinsic Motivation

    Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA · Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA · Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA +1

  18. Curiosity as Linguistic Intervention: Using LLM Tutoring Dialogues to Influence Exploratory Learning Behavior

    Jun 21, 2026Gevindu Ganganath, Pasindu Bolonghege, Qianru Lyu +2Intelligent Tutoring SystemsIntrinsic Motivation

    School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University · Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

  19. Can In-Context Learning Support Intrinsic Curiosity?

    Jun 17, 2026Eric Elmoznino, Sangnie Bhardwaj, Johannes von Oswald +5Intrinsic Reward MethodsIntrinsic Motivation

    1Google – Paradigms of Intelligence Team, 2Google DeepMind

  20. VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

    Jun 12, 2026Venkata Naren Devarakonda, Raktim Gautam Goswami, Prashanth Krishnamurthy +1Diffusion-Based PlanningRobot Navigation

    Control/Robotics Research Laboratory (CRRL), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY, 11201.

  21. Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

    Jun 9, 2026Ayush Mittal, Dhruv GuptaReward HackingIntrinsic Motivation

  22. A Motivational Architecture for Conversational AGI

    Jun 3, 2026Anna Mikeda, Ben GoertzelCognitive Architectures for AI AgentsIntrinsic Motivation

    Glass Umbrella · SingularityNet

  23. CIG: Exploration via Conditional Information Gain

    May 20, 2026Tim Joseph, Marcus Fechner, Philipp Stegmaier +2Intrinsic Reward MethodsIntrinsic Motivation

    FZI · KIT

  24. A conceptual framework for learning to listen by reward: Curiosity-driven search for novel sources

    May 19, 2026Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Jakub Šťastný, Alexios Terpinas +3Reinforcement LearningIntrinsic Motivation

    CHI – Chair of Health Informatics, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · MCML – Munich Center for Machine Learning, Munich, Germany · MDSI – Munich Data Science Institute, Munich, Germany +1

  25. Intrinsic Vicarious Conditioning for Deep Reinforcement Learning

    May 12, 2026Rodney A Sanchez, Ferat Sahin, Alex Ororbia +1Reinforcement LearningIntrinsic Motivation

    Department of Electrical and Microelectronic Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology · Department of Computer Science, Rochester Institute of Technology

  26. Measuring Learning Progress via Gradient-Momentum Coupling

    May 7, 2026Samuel Blad, Martin Längkvist, Amy LoutfiReinforcement LearningIntrinsic Motivation

    Örebro University

  27. What You Think is What You See: Driving Exploration in VLM Agents via Visual-Linguistic Curiosity

    May 5, 2026Haoxi Li, Qinglin Hou, Jianfei Ma +6Intrinsic MotivationRL Exploration

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, China. · Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA · School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore. +1

  28. Quality-Aware Exploration Budget Allocation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

    May 3, 2026Dahyun Oh, Minhyuk Yoon, H. Jin KimMulti-Agent CoordinationIntrinsic Reward Methods

    Department of Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  29. Multi-Agent Empowerment and Emergence of Complex Behavior in Groups

    Apr 22, 2026Tristan Shah, Ilya Nemenman, Daniel Polani +1Multi-Agent CoordinationIntrinsic Motivation

    Department of Computer Science Texas Tech University United States of America · Department of Physics, Department of Biology, Initiative in Theory and Modeling of Living Systems Emory University United States of America · Department of Computer Science, School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science University of Hertfordshire United Kingdom

  30. Curiosity-Critic: Cumulative Prediction Error Improvement as a Tractable Intrinsic Reward for World Model Training

    Apr 20, 2026Vin Bhaskara, Haicheng WangIntrinsic Reward MethodsReinforcement Learning

    Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.