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

Diving deeper into distributed reinforcement learning

As we already mentioned in the earlier chapters, training sophisticated reinforcement learning agents requires massive amounts of data. While one critical area of research is to increase the sample efficiency in RL, the other and complementary direction is about how to best utilize the compute power and parallelization and reduce the wall-clock time and cost of training. We already covered, implemented, and used distributed RL algorithms and libraries in the earlier chapters. So, this section will be an extension of the previous discussions due to the importance of this topic. Here, we present additional material on state-of-the-art distributed RL architectures, algorithms, and libraries. With that, let's get started with SEED RL, an architecture designed for massive and efficient parallelization.

Scalable, efficient deep reinforcement learning: SEED RL

Let's first begin the discussion by revisiting the Ape-X architecture...