Is Intrinsic Motivation a Viable PhD Topic in 2026? [D]

Background

I started a PhD in CS about a year and a half ago. Generally speaking, my topic is on intrinsic motivation (more commonly people refer to it as unsupervised RL). Intrinsic motivation (IM) is a niche field within AI. It seeks to develop reward signals which are not specific to any task but rather something closer to the low-level motivators that drive intelligent behaviors in animals.

Some prominent examples are:

• Empowerment: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00005
• Diversity is all you need: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06070
• Intrinsic curiosity module: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05363
• Random network distillation: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.12894

...and many more.

The Core Question

My question is: is this topic still "worth" pursuing now? Almost every day I see a new video of a robot doing some amazing acrobatic flip, navigating over hostile terrain, or performing some dexterous manipulation task. I believe that most of this is being done with human supervision through either a carefully tuned reward signal or behavior cloning from human demonstrations.

If incredible advances are being made in robot learning without IM, then why is it necessary at all? Furthermore, IM has typically been restricted to very simple scenarios such as low-dimensional robotic systems in simulation (hopper, walker, etc.).

Personal Concerns

On a more personal note, I have some concerns about future employability. If I focus too heavily on this niche topic during my PhD, I worry that it may be impossible to get hired at a research lab that would prefer a candidate with experience in behavior cloning or other hot topics.

I'm curious to hear what this community thinks. Has anyone been in a similar situation with their PhD topic?