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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to combine deep learning techniques to a DQN model and train it to play the Atari game Breakout. We first looked at adding convolutional layers to the agent for processing screenshots from the game. This helped the agent to better understand the game environment.

We then took things a step further and added an RNN to the outputs of the CNN model. We created a sequence of images and fed it to an LSTM layer. This sequential model provided the DQN agent with the ability to "visualize" the direction of the ball. This kind of model is called a DRQN.

Finally, we used an attention mechanism and trained a DARQN model to play the Breakout game. This mechanism helped the model to better understand previous relevant states and improved its performance drastically. This field is still evolving as new deep learning techniques and models are designed, outperforming previous generations in the process.

In the next chapter, you will be introduced...