Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning

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

Python Reinforcement Learning

By: Sudharsan Ravichandiran, Sean Saito, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani, Yang Wenzhuo

Overview of this book

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the trending and most promising branch of artificial intelligence. This Learning Path will help you master not only the basic reinforcement learning algorithms but also the advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The Learning Path starts with an introduction to RL followed by OpenAI Gym, and TensorFlow. You will then explore various RL algorithms, such as Markov Decision Process, Monte Carlo methods, and dynamic programming, including value and policy iteration. You'll also work on various datasets including image, text, and video. This example-rich guide will introduce you to deep RL algorithms, such as Dueling DQN, DRQN, A3C, PPO, and TRPO. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. You will also learn about imagination-augmented agents, learning from human preference, DQfD, HER, and many of the recent advancements in RL. By the end of the Learning Path, you will have all the knowledge and experience needed to implement RL and deep RL in your projects, and you enter the world of artificial intelligence to solve various real-life problems. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python by Sudharsan Ravichandiran • Python Reinforcement Learning Projects by Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, and Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. The Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic Network

In the previous chapters, we have seen how cool a Deep Q Network (DQN) is and how it succeeded in generalizing its learning to play a series of Atari games with a human level performance. But the problem we faced is that it required a large amount of computation power and training time. So, Google's DeepMind introduced a new algorithm called the Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) algorithm, which dominates the other deep reinforcement learning algorithms, as it requires less computation power and training time. The main idea behind A3C is that it uses several agents for learning in parallel and aggregates their overall experience. In this chapter, we will see how A3C networks work. Following this, we will learn how to build an agent to drive up a mountain using A3C. 

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

  • The Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic Algorithm
  • The three As
  • The architecture of A3C
  • How A3C works
  • Driving up a mountain...