Intrinsic Motivation

Latest papers 35

4 papers in the last four weeks, down 20% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Learning to See through Action: Predictive Curiosity for Robots
Oct 9, 2026Stelios Zarifis, Panagiotis Filntisis, George Retsinas +1Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning Active 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
A Unified Framework for Empowerment and Predictive Control
Oct 2, 2026Wooyoung Chung, Tristan Shah, Volodymyr Makarenko +1Model Predictive Control Intrinsic Motivation
Department of Computer Science, Whitacre College of Engineering, Texas Tech University.
Bellman Meets Lyapunov: Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning via Mastering Chaos
Oct 1, 2026Tristan Shah, Wooyoung Chung, Volodomyr Makarenko +2Reinforcement Learning Intrinsic Motivation
Texas Tech University · Purdue University
Intrinsic Motivation in Reinforcement Learning: A Research Agenda for Adaptive Self-Organisation
Sep 15, 2026Anatoly BelikovIntrinsic Motivation Intrinsic Reward Methods
SingularityNET Foundation
Artificial Id: Drive and Persistent Alignment in Agentic AI
Sep 10, 2026Yakov Pyotr ShkolnikovAI Alignment Intrinsic Motivation
Independent Researcher
Application of curiosity driven exploration methods for hardware interference identification
Sep 8, 2026Ludovic Matar, Clement Moulin-Frier, Pierre-Yves OudeyerIntrinsic Motivation
1Flowers AI & CogSci Lab - National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, Bordeaux, France
SUN: Reaching for Novelty in Reinforcement Learning
Sep 8, 2026Wenyan Yang, Arsenii Mustafin, Dominik Baumann +2Intrinsic Motivation RL Exploration
Aalto University · Tampere University
DynCur-Geo: Dynamic Curiosity Reward Shaping for Multimodal Active Geo-Localization
Aug 19, 2026Yiming Sun, Yang Zhang, Pengfei ZhuUAV Navigation Reward Shaping
School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
tinyDSM: A Framework for Skill Modeling and Development for Resource-Constrained Millirobots
Aug 18, 2026Markus Kobelrausch, Michael Miedler, Axel JantschRobot Skill Learning Intrinsic Motivation
Institute of Computer Technology, TU Wien, 1040 Vienna, Austria
Exploration-Driven Personalized Federated Reinforcement Learning via Intrinsic Motivation
Aug 11, 2026Md Rafid Islam, Rafsan Jany, Zahid Hasan +1Federated RL Intrinsic 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
S3: Stable Subgoal Selection by Constraining Uncertainty of Coarse Dynamics in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Jul 21, 2026Kshitij Kumar Srivastava, Kshitij JerathHierarchical RL Intrinsic Motivation
University of Massachusetts, Lowell United States
Intelligence from Learnable Novelty
Jul 20, 2026Yanbo Zhang, Michael LevinNovelty Search Intrinsic Motivation
Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, Medford, MA, 02155, USA · Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA
A framework for single and multi-agent human-AI curiosity ecosystems
Jul 7, 2026Ilya E. MonosovAI Agents for Scientific Discovery Intrinsic 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
Curiosity as Linguistic Intervention: Using LLM Tutoring Dialogues to Influence Exploratory Learning Behavior
Jun 21, 2026Gevindu Ganganath, Pasindu Bolonghege, Qianru Lyu +2Intelligent Tutoring Systems Intrinsic Motivation
School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University · Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Can In-Context Learning Support Intrinsic Curiosity?
Jun 17, 2026Eric Elmoznino, Sangnie Bhardwaj, Johannes von Oswald +5Intrinsic Reward Methods Intrinsic Motivation
1Google – Paradigms of Intelligence Team, 2Google DeepMind
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 Planning Robot Navigation
Control/Robotics Research Laboratory (CRRL), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY, 11201.
Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant
Jun 9, 2026Ayush Mittal, Dhruv GuptaReward Hacking Intrinsic Motivation
A Motivational Architecture for Conversational AGI
Jun 3, 2026Anna Mikeda, Ben GoertzelCognitive Architectures for AI Agents Intrinsic Motivation
Glass Umbrella · SingularityNet
CIG: Exploration via Conditional Information Gain
May 20, 2026Tim Joseph, Marcus Fechner, Philipp Stegmaier +2Intrinsic Reward Methods Intrinsic Motivation
FZI · KIT
A conceptual framework for learning to listen by reward: Curiosity-driven search for novel sources
May 19, 2026Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Jakub Šťastný, Alexios Terpinas +3Reinforcement Learning Intrinsic 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
Intrinsic Vicarious Conditioning for Deep Reinforcement Learning
May 12, 2026Rodney A Sanchez, Ferat Sahin, Alex Ororbia +1Reinforcement Learning Intrinsic Motivation
Department of Electrical and Microelectronic Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology · Department of Computer Science, Rochester Institute of Technology
Measuring Learning Progress via Gradient-Momentum Coupling
May 7, 2026Samuel Blad, Martin Längkvist, Amy LoutfiReinforcement Learning Intrinsic Motivation
Örebro University
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 Motivation RL 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
Quality-Aware Exploration Budget Allocation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
May 3, 2026Dahyun Oh, Minhyuk Yoon, H. Jin KimMulti-Agent Coordination Intrinsic Reward Methods
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Multi-Agent Empowerment and Emergence of Complex Behavior in Groups
Apr 22, 2026Tristan Shah, Ilya Nemenman, Daniel Polani +1Multi-Agent Coordination Intrinsic 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
Curiosity-Critic: Cumulative Prediction Error Improvement as a Tractable Intrinsic Reward for World Model Training
Apr 20, 2026Vin Bhaskara, Haicheng WangIntrinsic Reward Methods Reinforcement Learning
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Training LLM Agents for Spontaneous, Reward-Free Self-Evolution via World Knowledge Exploration
Apr 20, 2026Qifan Zhang, Dongyang Ma, Tianqing Fang +5Intrinsic Motivation LLM Agent Self-Improvement
1Tencent · 2The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
Human Cognition in Machines: A Unified Perspective of World Models
Apr 17, 2026Timothy Rupprecht, Pu Zhao, Amir Taherin +20Computational Cognitive Modeling World Model Learning
Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA · EmbodyX Inc., San Mateo, CA, USA · Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA +2
Generalizable Dense Reward for Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks
Mar 31, 2026Silong Yong, Stephen Sheng, Carl Qi +6Reinforcement Learning Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
Carnegie Mellon University · Amazon Robotics · UT Austin
Motivation in Large Language Models
Mar 15, 2026Omer Nahum, Asael Sklar, Ariel Goldstein +1Intrinsic Motivation Language Model Self-Assessment
Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion, Haifa, Israel. · Arison School of Business, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel. · Center for Human Inspired AI, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK. +1

Oct 9, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Learning to See through Action: Predictive Curiosity for Robots

Stelios Zarifis, Panagiotis Filntisis, George Retsinas, Petros Maragos

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

Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning Active Vision for Robot Manipulation Intrinsic Motivation Robotic RL

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Humans and animals do not learn vision from a fixed set of data: they move, interact, and learn from the visual consequences of their actions. Motivated by this developmental view, we study whether robots can improve visual learning by actively collecting experience through curiosity-driven interaction. We introduce DySCOVER, a self-supervised framework for active robot visual learning. A robot observes RGB frames, learns a visual autoencoder that encodes and reconstructs them, and trains a recurrent world model to predict the next visual latent state conditioned on the current state and action. The agent's policy is trained only with intrinsic rewards: reconstruction error encourages visually novel observations, while the world model's error encourages transitions whose consequences are not yet predictable. This prediction error biases the policy toward more intricate trajectories that enrich the agent's set of experiences with observations beyond those encouraged by visual novelty alone. Our experiments conducted with robotic arms as the embodied agents show that adding predictive curiosity improves the vision model over using visual curiosity alone. Across variations in initial conditions, experience capacity, embodiment, and scene content, adding predictive curiosity consistently improved visual learning. These results show that predictive curiosity can improve active visual learning beyond reconstruction-based curiosity alone.