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 SARSA and Q-Learning

In this section, we will learn about SARSA and Q-Learning and how can they are coded with Python. Before we go further, let's find out what SARSA and Q-Learning are. SARSA is an algorithm that uses the state-action Q values to update. These concepts are derived from the computer science field of dynamic programming, while Q-learning is an off-policy algorithm that was first proposed by Christopher Watkins in 1989, and is a widely used RL algorithm.

Learning SARSA

SARSA is another on-policy algorithm that was very popular, particularly in the 1990s. It is an extension of TD-learning, which we saw previously, and is an on-policy algorithm. SARSA keeps an update of the state-action value...