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

Reinforcement Learning Frameworks

In the previous sections, we learned the basic theory behind RL. In principle, an agent or an environment can be implemented in any way or any language. For RL, the primary language used by both academic and industrial people is Python, as it allows you to focus on the algorithms and not on the language details, making it very simple to use. Implementing, from scratch, an algorithm or a complex environment (that is, an autonomous driving environment) might be very difficult and error-prone. For this reason, several well-established and well-tested libraries make RL very easy for newcomers. In this section, we will explore the main Python RL libraries. We will present OpenAI Gym, a set of environments that is ready to use and easy to modify, and OpenAI Baselines, a set of high quality, state-of-the-art algorithms. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned about and practiced with environments and agents.

OpenAI Gym

OpenAI Gym (https:/...