Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By : Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani
Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By: Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani

Overview of this book

Reinforcement learning is one of the most exciting and rapidly growing fields in machine learning. This is due to the many novel algorithms developed and incredible results published in recent years. In this book, you will learn about the core concepts of RL including Q-learning, policy gradients, Monte Carlo processes, and several deep reinforcement learning algorithms. As you make your way through the book, you'll work on projects with datasets of various modalities including image, text, and video. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore technologies such as TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement deep learning reinforcement learning algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience with eight reinforcement learning projects, each addressing different topics and/or algorithms. We hope these practical exercises will provide you with better intuition and insight about the field of reinforcement learning and how to apply its algorithms to various problems in real life.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Simulating Control Tasks

In the previous chapter, we saw the notable success of deep Q-learning (DQN) in training an AI agent to play Atari games. One limitation of DQN is that the action space must be discrete, namely, only a finite number of actions are available for the agent to select and the total number of actions cannot be too large. However, many practical tasks require continuous actions, which makes DQN difficult to apply. A naive remedy for DQN in this case is discretizing the continuous action space. But this remedy doesn't work due to the curse of dimensionality, meaning that DQN quickly becomes infeasible and does not generalize well.

This chapter will discuss deep reinforcement learning algorithms for control tasks with a continuous action space. Several classic control tasks, such as CartPole, Pendulum, and Acrobot, will be introduced first. You will learn how to simulate these tasks using Gym and understand the goal and the reward for each task. Then, a basic actor...