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

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we were introduced to the OpenAI Gym environment and also learned how to implement custom environments, depending on the application. You also learned the basics of TensorFlow 2, how to implement a policy using the TensorFlow 2 framework, and how to visualize learning using TensorBoard. In this chapter, we will see how Dynamic Programming (DP) works in general, from a computer science perspective. Then, we'll go over how and why it is used in RL. Next, we will dive deep into classic DP algorithms such as policy evaluation, policy iteration, and value iteration and compare them. Lastly, we will implement the algorithms in the classic coin-change problem.

DP is one of the most fundamental and foundational topics in computer science. Furthermore, RL algorithms such as Value Iteration, Policy Iteration, and others, as we will see, use the same basic principle: avoid repeated computations to save time, which is what DP is all about. The philosophy...