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

Human demonstrations

The idea behind demonstrations is simple: to help our agent to discover the best way to solve the task, we show it some examples of actions that we think are required for the problem. Those examples could be not the best solution or not 100% accurate, but they should be good enough to show the agent promising directions to explore.

In fact, this is a very natural thing to do, as all human learning is based on some prior examples given by a teacher in class, parents, or other people. Those examples could be in a written form (for example, recipe books) or given as demonstrations that you need to repeat several times to get right (for example, dance classes). Such forms of training are much more effective than random searches. Just imagine how complicated and lengthy it would be to learn how to clean your teeth by trial and error alone. Of course, there is a danger from learning how to follow demonstrations, which could be wrong or not the most efficient way to...