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

How to Implement a Neural Network Using TensorFlow

In this section, we will look at the most important aspects to consider when implementing a deep neural network. Starting with the very basic concepts, we will go through all the steps that lead up to the creation of a state-of-the-art deep learning model. We will cover the network architecture's definition, training strategies, and performance improvement techniques, understanding how they work, and preparing you so that you can tackle the next section's exercises, where these concepts will be applied to solve real-world problems.

To successfully implement a deep neural network in TensorFlow, we have to complete a given number of steps. These can be summarized and grouped as follows:

  1. Model creation: Network architecture definition, input features encoding, embeddings, output layers
  2. Model training: Loss function definition, optimizer choice, features normalization, backpropagation
  3. Model validation: Strategies...