An exhaustive, ranked reading list of the intrinsic reward literature: the short-term signal an agent gives itself — curiosity, novelty, surprise, empowerment — layered on top of the sparse long-term reward from the world.
This page maps the intrinsic side. Everything is ranked as a single learning path — read top-to-bottom and the field assembles itself: foundations first, then the core curiosity/novelty methods, the major branches (information gain, empowerment, state-entropy, episodic memory, learning progress, homeostasis), then specialized work, theory/surveys, and the LLM-era bridge back to the papers in this collection. Filter by sub-branch below. Summaries get to the mechanism and stop.
🔥 Want the concepts, not the list? The approaches & the math that separates them ↗ a synthesis organized by method, with each reward formula explained simply. This page is the exhaustive bibliography; that one is how to think about the subject.
Tell me what's missing, mis-ranked, or worth a full deep-dive. Anonymous.