Atari (Arcade Learning Environment)

data category: Reinforcement learning environments · 0 papers in the last 7 days

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Simulators and benchmark suites for training and comparing reinforcement learning agents.

Names searched for: Arcade Learning Environment, Atari 2600, Atari games

Key findings#

From Nov 2023 to Oct 2026, 77 archived papers mentioned Atari (Arcade Learning Environment) in their title, abstract or keywords (the search of earlier months' full texts is still under way), most of them in Nov 2023 (6).
No paper of the tracked journals mentioned Atari (Arcade Learning Environment) in the last 30 days (2026-10-07 to 2026-11-05).
From 2017 to 2026 (so far), Atari (Arcade Learning Environment) was mentioned in 128 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (115), operations research (10) and information systems (1).
27 of them were published in 2025, against 0 in 2017.
Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (5), Tsinghua University (5) and Eindhoven University of Technology (3).
The journals publishing most of them were IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (15), Artificial Intelligence Review (8) and Machine Learning (8).
The most-cited of them is “Sigmoid-weighted linear units for neural network function approximation in reinforcement learning” (Neural Networks, 2018), with 2,113 citations.
Papers use Atari (Arcade Learning Environment) most often with MuJoCo (28), OpenAI Gym / Gymnasium (24) and StarCraft (15); it has 12 partners in the code and data network, in the group around ImageNet, CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100, MNIST / Fashion-MNIST.

Mentions over 36 months#

Papers mentioning it by publication month, Nov 2023 to Oct 2026 (titles, abstracts and keywords; the full texts of earlier months are still being searched)
Trend	Nov 23–Oct 24	Nov 24–Oct 25	Nov 25–Oct 26	36 months
	31	33	13	77

Papers per year#

20172026 (so far)

Papers per publication year and category
Category	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026 (so far)
AI	3	3	5	16	9	20	28	22	9
Operations Research	0	0	0	0	0	1	3	5	1
Information Systems	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
Finance	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0
Economics	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
All categories	3	3	6	16	9	21	32	27	11

Where the papers come from#

Journals with the most papers, since 2023
#	Journal	Papers
1	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	15
2	Artificial Intelligence Review	8
3	Machine Learning	8
4	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	7
5	Neural Computing and Applications	7
6	Neural Networks	6
7	Applied Intelligence	6
8	IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence	4
9	Artificial Intelligence	3
10	Journal Of Big Data	3

Institutions with the most papers, since 2023
#	Institution	Papers
1	Chinese Academy of Sciences	5
2	Tsinghua University	5
3	Eindhoven University of Technology	3
4	Institute of Automation	3
5	National University of Defense Technology	3
6	Northwestern University	3
7	Peking University	3
8	Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory	3
9	University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	3
10	Academia Sinica	2

Countries with the most papers, since 2023
#	Country	Papers
1	China	32
2	United States	13
3	Germany	10
4	Canada	7
5	United Kingdom	7
6	Hong Kong	7
7	Netherlands	6
8	Belgium	4
9	Spain	3
10	India	3

Keywords with the most papers, since 2023
#	Keyword	Papers
1	deep reinforcement learning	24
2	Atari games	19
3	reinforcement learning	16
4	sample efficiency	9
5	large language models	7
6	intrinsic rewards	6
7	data efficiency	5
8	deep Q-network	5
9	energy efficiency	5
10	exploration	5

Most-cited papers#

Most-cited papers since 2017
#	Citations	Per month	Title	Journal	Published	Authors
1	2,113	20.0	Sigmoid-weighted linear units for neural network function approximation in reinforcement learning	Neural Networks	2018-01-11	Stefan Elfwing, Eiji Uchibe, Kenji Doya
2	637	23.4	End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2024-07-30	Li Chen, Penghao Wu, Kashyap Chitta et al.
3	176	7.5	Survey on Large Language Model-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning: Concept, Taxonomy, and Methods	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2024-11-25	Yuji Cao, Huan Qi Zhao, Yuheng Cheng et al.
4	120	1.1	Self-Paced Prioritized Curriculum Learning With Coverage Penalty in Deep Reinforcement Learning	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2018-02-01	Zhipeng Ren, Daoyi Dong, Huaxiong Li et al.
5	110	4.1	Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning: A Survey	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2024-08-07	Yongshuo Zong, Oisin Mac Aodha, Timothy M. Hospedales

Archive counts by publication year: a paper counts when its title, abstract or keywords name the dataset, or when OpenAlex's full-text search finds it there (searched for the last 30 days' papers and, by a pass over the past years, for older ones). Names added to the list later are looked for in older papers as the archive is read again.

Used together with#

Papers use Atari (Arcade Learning Environment) most often with MuJoCo (28), OpenAI Gym / Gymnasium (24) and StarCraft (15); it has 12 partners in the code and data network, in the group around ImageNet, CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100, MNIST / Fashion-MNIST. The whole network →

What papers use Atari (Arcade Learning Environment) together with (at least 3 papers; lift 1 = chance)
Used with	Type	Papers using both	Lift
MuJoCo	Dataset	28	69.8
OpenAI Gym / Gymnasium	Dataset	24	72.3
StarCraft	Dataset	15	39.5
ImageNet	Dataset	14	2.2
DeepMind Control Suite	Dataset	10	116.8
MNIST / Fashion-MNIST	Dataset	10	3.4
CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100	Dataset	9	2.4
D4RL	Dataset	5	34.0
Hugging Face Hub	Dataset	3	2.4
Wikipedia	Dataset	3	1.1
Farama-Foundation/Minigrid	Code repository	3	186.9
openai/baselines	Code repository	3	74.8

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Atari (Arcade Learning Environment). Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/datasets/atari-arcade-learning-environment

@misc{scholar4ai-datasets-atari-arcade-learning-environment,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Atari (Arcade Learning Environment)},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/datasets/atari-arcade-learning-environment}},
  urldate = {2026-11-05},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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