Intrinsic motivation Machine Learning
noun phrase
Definition: In AI (especially RL), a motivation signal in which the informational content or novelty of an experience is itself rewarding, often driving exploration and curiosity-like behavior [Yu et. al. 2025].
Example in context: “The idea of using learning progress (lp) as a intrinsic motivation for artificial agents dates back to the 1990s (Schmidhuber, 1991a, 1991b; Kaplan & Oudeyer, 2004; Oudeyer et al., 2007).” [Colas et al. 2022]
Related terms: curiosity-driven learning, exploration bonus, intrinsic reward