Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning

By : Sudharsan Ravichandiran, Sean Saito, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani, Yang Wenzhuo
Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning

By: Sudharsan Ravichandiran, Sean Saito, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani, Yang Wenzhuo

Overview of this book

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the trending and most promising branch of artificial intelligence. This Learning Path will help you master not only the basic reinforcement learning algorithms but also the advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The Learning Path starts with an introduction to RL followed by OpenAI Gym, and TensorFlow. You will then explore various RL algorithms, such as Markov Decision Process, Monte Carlo methods, and dynamic programming, including value and policy iteration. You'll also work on various datasets including image, text, and video. This example-rich guide will introduce you to deep RL algorithms, such as Dueling DQN, DRQN, A3C, PPO, and TRPO. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. You will also learn about imagination-augmented agents, learning from human preference, DQfD, HER, and many of the recent advancements in RL. By the end of the Learning Path, you will have all the knowledge and experience needed to implement RL and deep RL in your projects, and you enter the world of artificial intelligence to solve various real-life problems. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python by Sudharsan Ravichandiran • Python Reinforcement Learning Projects by Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, and Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 13. Simulating Control Tasks

In the previous chapter, we saw the notable success of deep Q-learning (DQN) in training an AI agent to play Atari games. One limitation of DQN is that the action space must be discrete, namely, only a finite number of actions are available for the agent to select and the total number of actions cannot be too large. However, many practical tasks require continuous actions, which makes DQN difficult to apply. A naive remedy for DQN in this case is discretizing the continuous action space. But this remedy doesn't work due to the curse of dimensionality, meaning that DQN quickly becomes infeasible and does not generalize well.

This chapter will discuss deep reinforcement learning algorithms for control tasks with a continuous action space. Several classic control tasks, such as CartPole, Pendulum, and Acrobot, will be introduced first. You will learn how to simulate these tasks using Gym and understand the goal and the reward for each task. Then, a basic...