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

This chapter dealt with temporal difference learning. We started by studying one-step methods in both their on-policy and off-policy implementations, leading to us learning about the SARSA and Q-learning algorithms, respectively. We tested these algorithms on the FrozenLake-v0 problem and covered both deterministic and stochastic transition dynamics. Then, we moved on to the N-step temporal difference methods, the first step toward the unification of TD and MC methods. We saw how on-policy and off-policy methods are extended to this case. Finally, we studied TD methods with eligibility traces, which constitute the most relevant step toward the formalization of a unique theory describing both TD and MC algorithms. We extended SARSA to eligibility tracing, too, and learned about this through implementing two exercises where it has been implemented and applied to the FrozenLake-v0 environment under both deterministic and stochastic transition dynamics. With this, we have been...