Book Image

TensorFlow Reinforcement Learning Quick Start Guide

By : Kaushik Balakrishnan
Book Image

TensorFlow Reinforcement Learning Quick Start Guide

By: Kaushik Balakrishnan

Overview of this book

Advances in reinforcement learning algorithms have made it possible to use them for optimal control in several different industrial applications. With this book, you will apply Reinforcement Learning to a range of problems, from computer games to autonomous driving. The book starts by introducing you to essential Reinforcement Learning concepts such as agents, environments, rewards, and advantage functions. You will also master the distinctions between on-policy and off-policy algorithms, as well as model-free and model-based algorithms. You will also learn about several Reinforcement Learning algorithms, such as SARSA, Deep Q-Networks (DQN), Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG), Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C), Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). The book will also show you how to code these algorithms in TensorFlow and Python and apply them to solve computer games from OpenAI Gym. Finally, you will also learn how to train a car to drive autonomously in the Torcs racing car simulator. By the end of the book, you will be able to design, build, train, and evaluate feed-forward neural networks and convolutional neural networks. You will also have mastered coding state-of-the-art algorithms and also training agents for various control problems.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Understanding TD learning

We will first learn about TD learning. This is a very fundamental concept in RL. In TD learning, the learning of the agent is attained by experience. Several trial episodes are undertaken of the environment, and the rewards accrued are used to update the value functions. Specifically, the agent will keep an update of the state-action value functions as it experiences new states/actions. The Bellman equation is used to update this state-action value function, and the goal is to minimize the TD error. This essentially means the agent is reducing its uncertainty of which action is the optimal action in a given state; it gains confidence on the optimal action in a given state by lowering the TD error.

Relation between the value functions and state

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