Book Image

The Reinforcement Learning Workshop

By : Alessandro Palmas, Emanuele Ghelfi, Dr. Alexandra Galina Petre, Mayur Kulkarni, Anand N.S., Quan Nguyen, Aritra Sen, Anthony So, Saikat Basak
Book Image

The Reinforcement Learning Workshop

By: Alessandro Palmas, Emanuele Ghelfi, Dr. Alexandra Galina Petre, Mayur Kulkarni, Anand N.S., Quan Nguyen, Aritra Sen, Anthony So, Saikat Basak

Overview of this book

Various intelligent applications such as video games, inventory management software, warehouse robots, and translation tools use reinforcement learning (RL) to make decisions and perform actions that maximize the probability of the desired outcome. This book will help you to get to grips with the techniques and the algorithms for implementing RL in your machine learning models. Starting with an introduction to RL, youÔÇÖll be guided through different RL environments and frameworks. YouÔÇÖll learn how to implement your own custom environments and use OpenAI baselines to run RL algorithms. Once youÔÇÖve explored classic RL techniques such as Dynamic Programming, Monte Carlo, and TD Learning, youÔÇÖll understand when to apply the different deep learning methods in RL and advance to deep Q-learning. The book will even help you understand the different stages of machine-based problem-solving by using DARQN on a popular video game Breakout. Finally, youÔÇÖll find out when to use a policy-based method to tackle an RL problem. By the end of The Reinforcement Learning Workshop, youÔÇÖll be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to solve challenging problems using reinforcement learning.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Preface
Free Chapter
2
2. Markov Decision Processes and Bellman Equations

Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning

In RL, the main goal is to learn from interaction. We want agents to learn a behavior, a way of selecting actions in given situations, to achieve some goal. The main difference between classical programming or planning is that we do not want to code the planning software explicitly on our own, as this would require a great effort; it can be very inefficient and even impossible. The RL discipline was born precisely for this reason.

RL agents start (usually) with no idea of what to do. They typically do not know the goal, they do not know the game's rules, and they do not know the dynamics of the environment or how their actions influence the state.

There are three main components of RL: perception, actions, and goals.

Agents should be able to perceive the current environment state to deal with a task. This perception, also called observation, might be different from the actual environment state, can be subject to noise, or can be...