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    2026 edition · Top 35

    Reinforcement learning

    Learning to act from reward: dynamic programming, value and policy methods, and deep RL.

    Reinforcement learning: 35 · N = 35, scaled from 83 candidates.

    0 of 35 of this page's 35 read · saved in this browser only

    1. 1
      Reinforcement learning2015

      Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning

      Timothy P. Lillicrap · 16,206 citations · Papers With Code

      Award
    2. 2
      Reinforcement learning2015

      Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning

      Volodymyr Mnih · 30,346 citations · OpenAlex

      Editor's note
    3. 3
      Reinforcement learning2015

      Trust Region Policy Optimization

      John Schulman · 8,424 citations · Papers With Code

      Award
    4. 4
      Reinforcement learning2016

      Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search

      David Silver · 15,607 citations · OpenAlex

      Editor's note
    5. 5
      Reinforcement learning1992

      Q-learning

      Christopher J. C. H. Watkins · 9,083 citations · OpenAlex

      Editor's note
    6. 6
      Reinforcement learning2017

      Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms

      John Schulman · 32,311 citations · Papers With Code

      Editor's note
    7. 7
      Reinforcement learning1999 · published 2000

      Policy Gradient Methods for Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation

      Richard S. Sutton · 8,074 citations · Semantic Scholar

      Editor's note
    8. 8
      Reinforcement learning2017

      Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge

      David Silver · 9,081 citations · OpenAlex

      Editor's note
    9. 9
      Reinforcement learning1992

      Simple statistical gradient-following algorithms for connectionist reinforcement learning

      Ronald J. Williams · 7,006 citations · OpenAlex

      Editor's note
    10. 10
      Reinforcement learning1988

      Learning to Predict by the Methods of Temporal Differences

      Richard S. Sutton · 5,130 citations · OpenAlex

      Editor's note
    11. 11
      Reinforcement learning2016

      Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning

      Volodymyr Mnih · 10,427 citations · Papers With Code

    12. 12
      Reinforcement learning2018

      Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor

      Tuomas Haarnoja · 12,708 citations · Papers With Code

    13. 13
      Reinforcement learning2013

      Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning

      Mnih · 14,077 citations · Papers With Code

    14. 14
      Reinforcement learning2019 · published 2020

      Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model

      Julian Schrittwieser · 2,800 citations · Papers With Code

      Editor's note
    15. 15
      Reinforcement learning2024

      DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models

      Zhihong Shao · 10,104 citations · Papers With Code

    16. 16
      Reinforcement learning2015 · published 2016

      Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning

      van Hasselt · 9,633 citations · Papers With Code

    17. 17
      Reinforcement learning2018

      A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play

      David Silver · 3,567 citations · OpenAlex

    18. 18
      Reinforcement learning2020

      Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning

      Aviral Kumar · 2,913 citations · Papers With Code

    19. 19
      Reinforcement learning2015 · published 2016

      High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation

      John Schulman · 5,052 citations · Papers With Code

    20. 20
      Reinforcement learning1983

      Neuronlike adaptive elements that can solve difficult learning control problems

      Andrew G. Barto · 3,240 citations · OpenAlex

    21. 21
      Reinforcement learning2015 · published 2016

      Prioritized Experience Replay

      Schaul · 4,696 citations · Papers With Code

    22. 22
      Reinforcement learning2014

      Deterministic Policy Gradient Algorithms

      David Silver · 4,690 citations · Semantic Scholar

    23. 23
      Reinforcement learning2021

      Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling

      Lili Chen · 2,574 citations · Papers With Code

    24. 24
      Reinforcement learning1999

      Between MDPs and semi-MDPs: A framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning

      Richard S. Sutton · 3,119 citations · OpenAlex

    25. 25
      Reinforcement learning2015 · published 2016

      Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning

      Wang · 4,626 citations · Papers With Code

    26. 26
      Reinforcement learning2018

      Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methods

      Scott Fujimoto · 7,671 citations · Papers With Code

    27. 27
      Reinforcement learning2016

      OpenAI Gym

      5,688 citations · Papers With Code

    28. 28
      Reinforcement learning1994

      Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming

      Puterman · 8,037 citations · OpenAlex

    29. 29
      Reinforcement learning1999 · published 2003

      Actor-Critic Algorithms

      Vijay R. Konda · 2,156 citations · OpenAlex

    30. 30
      Reinforcement learning2017

      Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Mixed Cooperative-Competitive Environments

      Ryan Lowe · 6,576 citations · Papers With Code

    31. 31
      Reinforcement learning2019

      Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination

      Danijar Hafner · 2,438 citations · Papers With Code

    32. 32
      Reinforcement learning2000

      Algorithms for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

      Andrew Y. Ng · 2,664 citations · Semantic Scholar

    33. 33
      Reinforcement learning1990

      Integrated Architectures for Learning, Planning, and Reacting Based on Approximating Dynamic Programming

      Richard S. Sutton · 1,348 citations · OpenAlex

    34. 34
      Reinforcement learning2019

      Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

      3,454 citations · OpenAlex

    35. 35
      Reinforcement learning2018

      Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution

      David Ha · 2,233 citations · Papers With Code

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      Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback

      Long Ouyang · 25,000 citations · Papers With Code

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      Paul Christiano · 6,187 citations · Papers With Code

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      Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model

      Rafael Rafailov · 11,135 citations · Papers With Code

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    4. Language, speech & LLMs2025

      DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

      DeepSeek-AI · 5,325 citations · Papers With Code

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    5. Classic AI: search, logic & planning1959

      Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers

      Arthur L. Samuel · 5,325 citations · Semantic Scholar

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    6. Robotics2012

      MuJoCo: A physics engine for model-based control

      Emanuel Todorov · 4,630 citations · OpenAlex

    Data sources

    Catalogue data from OpenAlex (CC0), Crossref (CC0 metadata; no abstracts are shown), arXiv, and Papers With Code (CC BY-SA 4.0), and Semantic Scholar logoSemantic Scholar (used under its non-commercial API licence). Each count names its source. See the method.