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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27
Index

Tuning hyperparameters

In the previous section, we had Pong solved in three hours of optimization and 9 million frames. Now is a good time to tweak our hyperparameters to speed up convergence. The golden rule here is to tweak one option at a time and make conclusions carefully, as the whole process is stochastic.

In this section, we will start with the original hyperparameters and perform the following experiments:

  • Increase the learning rate
  • Increase the entropy beta
  • Change the count of environments that we are using to gather experience
  • Tweak the size of the batch

Strictly speaking, the following experiments weren't proper hyperparameter tuning but just an attempt to get a better understanding of how A2C convergence dynamics depend on the parameters. To find the best set of parameters, the full grid search or random sampling of values could give much better results, but they would require much more time and resources.

Learning rate

Our starting...