Book Image

Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python

By : Enes Bilgin
Book Image

Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python

By: Enes Bilgin

Overview of this book

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) used for creating self-learning autonomous agents. Building on a strong theoretical foundation, this book takes a practical approach and uses examples inspired by real-world industry problems to teach you about state-of-the-art RL. Starting with bandit problems, Markov decision processes, and dynamic programming, the book provides an in-depth review of the classical RL techniques, such as Monte Carlo methods and temporal-difference learning. After that, you will learn about deep Q-learning, policy gradient algorithms, actor-critic methods, model-based methods, and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Then, you'll be introduced to some of the key approaches behind the most successful RL implementations, such as domain randomization and curiosity-driven learning. As you advance, you’ll explore many novel algorithms with advanced implementations using modern Python libraries such as TensorFlow and Ray’s RLlib package. You’ll also find out how to implement RL in areas such as robotics, supply chain management, marketing, finance, smart cities, and cybersecurity while assessing the trade-offs between different approaches and avoiding common pitfalls. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered how to train and deploy your own RL agents for solving RL problems.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Section 1: Reinforcement Learning Foundations
7
Section 2: Deep Reinforcement Learning
12
Section 3: Advanced Topics in RL
17
Section 4: Applications of RL

Introducing meta-reinforcement learning

Meta-reinforcement learning is an intuitive concept, but it could be hard to wrap your mind around it at first. In this section, we make an introduction and discuss the connection between meta-RL and other concepts we covered in the earlier chapters.

Learning to learn

Let's say you are trying to convince a friend of going on a travel together that you really want. There are several arguments coming to your mind. You could talk about:

  • The beauty of the nature at your destination,
  • How you are so burned out and really need this time away,
  • This could be the last chance for a travel together for a while because you will be busy at work.

Well, you know your friend for years and how they love nature, so you recognize that the first argument will be the most enticing one! If it were your mom, perhaps you could use the second one because she cares about you a lot and wants to support you. In either of these situations...