Book Image

Learn Unity ML-Agents ??? Fundamentals of Unity Machine Learning

Book Image

Learn Unity ML-Agents ??? Fundamentals of Unity Machine Learning

Overview of this book

Unity Machine Learning agents allow researchers and developers to create games and simulations using the Unity Editor, which serves as an environment where intelligent agents can be trained with machine learning methods through a simple-to-use Python API. This book takes you from the basics of Reinforcement and Q Learning to building Deep Recurrent Q-Network agents that cooperate or compete in a multi-agent ecosystem. You will start with the basics of Reinforcement Learning and how to apply it to problems. Then you will learn how to build self-learning advanced neural networks with Python and Keras/TensorFlow. From there you move o n to more advanced training scenarios where you will learn further innovative ways to train your network with A3C, imitation, and curriculum learning models. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build more complex environments by building a cooperative and competitive multi-agent ecosystem.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Going Deeper with Deep Learning

At the end of the last chapter, we took a peek at what is possible with neural networks using an advanced RL algorithm called PPO. What we didn't cover are the details of how this code worked and what it is capable of. While teaching you about all the details of this model would take a book by itself, we will try and cover the basic features in this chapter. Also, keep in mind that while we will be talking about the Unity-specific training implementation, many of the concepts can be carried over to other deep learning models.

In this chapter, we will look at several concepts that are internal to the learn.py training script using PPO and by exploring the Unity ML-Agents examples. Here is what we will be covering in this chapter:

  • Agent training problems
  • Convolutional neural networks
  • Experience replay
  • Partial observability, memory, and recurrent...