Book Image

Hands-On Intelligent Agents with OpenAI Gym

By : Palanisamy P
Book Image

Hands-On Intelligent Agents with OpenAI Gym

By: Palanisamy P

Overview of this book

Many real-world problems can be broken down into tasks that require a series of decisions to be made or actions to be taken. The ability to solve such tasks without a machine being programmed requires a machine to be artificially intelligent and capable of learning to adapt. This book is an easy-to-follow guide to implementing learning algorithms for machine software agents in order to solve discrete or continuous sequential decision making and control tasks. Hands-On Intelligent Agents with OpenAI Gym takes you through the process of building intelligent agent algorithms using deep reinforcement learning starting from the implementation of the building blocks for configuring, training, logging, visualizing, testing, and monitoring the agent. You will walk through the process of building intelligent agents from scratch to perform a variety of tasks. In the closing chapters, the book provides an overview of the latest learning environments and learning algorithms, along with pointers to more resources that will help you take your deep reinforcement learning skills to the next level.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Proximal Policy Optimization

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a policy gradient-based method and is one of the algorithms that have been proven to be stable as well as scalable. In fact, PPO was the algorithm used by the OpenAI Five team of agents that played (and won) against several human DOTA II players, which we discussed in our previous chapter.

Core concept

In policy gradient methods, the algorithm performs rollouts to collect samples of transitions and (potentially) rewards, and updates the parameters of the policy using gradient descent to minimize the objective function. The idea is to keep updating the parameters to improve the policy until a good policy is obtained. To improve the training stability, the Trust...