Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On - Second Edition

By : Maxim Lapan
5 (2)
Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On - Second Edition

5 (2)
By: Maxim Lapan

Overview of this book

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition is an updated and expanded version of the bestselling guide to the very latest reinforcement learning (RL) tools and techniques. It provides you with an introduction to the fundamentals of RL, along with the hands-on ability to code intelligent learning agents to perform a range of practical tasks. With six new chapters devoted to a variety of up-to-the-minute developments in RL, including discrete optimization (solving the Rubik's Cube), multi-agent methods, Microsoft's TextWorld environment, advanced exploration techniques, and more, you will come away from this book with a deep understanding of the latest innovations in this emerging field. In addition, you will gain actionable insights into such topic areas as deep Q-networks, policy gradient methods, continuous control problems, and highly scalable, non-gradient methods. You will also discover how to build a real hardware robot trained with RL for less than $100 and solve the Pong environment in just 30 minutes of training using step-by-step code optimization. In short, Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition, is your companion to navigating the exciting complexities of RL as it helps you attain experience and knowledge through real-world examples.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
26
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Index

Variance reduction

In the previous chapter, I briefly mentioned that one of the ways to improve the stability of policy gradient methods is to reduce the variance of the gradient. Now let's try to understand why this is important and what it means to reduce the variance. In statistics, variance is the expected square deviation of a random variable from the expected value of that variable.

Variance shows us how far values are dispersed from the mean. When variance is high, the random variable can take values that deviate widely from the mean. On the following plot, there is a normal (Gaussian) distribution with the same value for the mean, , but with different values for the variance.

Figure 12.1: The effect of variance on Gaussian distribution

Now let's return to policy gradients. It was stated in the previous chapter that the idea is to increase the probability of good actions and decrease the chance of bad ones. In math notation, our policy gradient was...