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 about policy-based methods, principally the drawbacks to value-based methods such as Q-learning, which motivate the use of policy gradients. We discussed the purposes of policy-based methods of RL, along with the trade-offs of other RL approaches.

You learned about the policy gradients that help a model to learn in a real-time environment. Next, we learned how to implement the DDPG using the actor-critic model, the ReplayBuffer class, and Ornstein–Uhlenbeck noise to understand the continuous action space. We also learned how you can improve policy gradients by using techniques such as TRPO and PPO. Finally, we talked in brief about the A2C method, which is an advanced version of the actor-critic model.

Also, in this chapter, we played around with the Lunar Lander environment in OpenAI Gym—for both continuous and discrete action spaces—and coded the multiple policy-based RL approaches that we discussed.

In the next chapter...