Book Image

Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow

By : Sayon Dutta
Book Image

Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow

By: Sayon Dutta

Overview of this book

Reinforcement learning (RL) allows you to develop smart, quick and self-learning systems in your business surroundings. It's an effective method for training learning agents and solving a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence - from games, self-driving cars and robots, to enterprise applications such as data center energy saving (cooling data centers) and smart warehousing solutions. The book covers major advancements and successes achieved in deep reinforcement learning by synergizing deep neural network architectures with reinforcement learning. You'll also be introduced to the concept of reinforcement learning, its advantages and the reasons why it's gaining so much popularity. You'll explore MDPs, Monte Carlo tree searches, dynamic programming such as policy and value iteration, and temporal difference learning such as Q-learning and SARSA. You will use TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to build simple neural network models that learn from their own actions. You will also see how reinforcement learning algorithms play a role in games, image processing and NLP. By the end of this book, you will have gained a firm understanding of what reinforcement learning is and understand how to put your knowledge to practical use by leveraging the power of TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The policy optimization method


The goal of the policy optimization method is to find the stochastic policy 

 that is a distribution of actions for a given state that maximizes the expected sum of rewards. It aims to find the policy directly. The basic overview is to create a neural network (that is, policy network) that processes some state information and outputs the distribution of possible actions that an agent might take.

The two major components of policy optimization are:

  • The weight parameter of the neural network is defined by 
     vector, which is also the parameter of our control policy. Thus, our aim is to train the weight parameters to obtain the best policy. Since we value the policy as the expected sum of rewards for the given policy. Here, for different parameter values of 
    , policy will differ and hence, the optimal policy would be the one having the maximum overall reward. Therefore, the 
     parameter which has the maximum expected reward will be the optimal policy. Following is the...