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

Applications of Reinforcement Learning

RL has exciting and useful applications in many different contexts. Recently, the usage of deep neural networks has augmented the number of possible applications considerably.

When used in a deep learning context, RL can also be referred to as deep RL.

The applications vary from games and video games to real-world applications, such as robotics and autonomous driving. In each of these applications, RL is a game-changer, allowing you to solve tasks that are considered to be almost impossible (or, at least, very difficult) without these techniques.

In this section, we will present some RL applications, describe the challenges of each application, and begin to understand why RL is preferred among other methods, along with its advantages and its drawbacks.

Games

Nowadays, RL is widely used in video games and board games.

Games are used to benchmark RL algorithms because, usually, they are very complex to solve yet easy to implement...