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

Training an RL Agent to Solve a Classic Control Problem

In this section, we will learn how to train a reinforcement learning agent capable of solving a classic control problem named CartPole by building upon all the concepts explained previously. OpenAI Baselines will be leveraged and, following the steps highlighted in the previous section, we will use a custom fully connected network as a policy network, which is provided as input for the PPO algorithm.

Let's have a quick recap of the CartPole control problem. It is a classic control problem with a continuous four-dimensional observation space and a discrete two-dimensional action space. The observations that are recorded are the position and velocity of the cart along its line of movement, as well as the angle and angular velocity of the pole. The actions are the left/right movement of the cart along its rail. The reward is +1.0 for every step that does not result in a terminal state, which is the case if the pole moves...