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)
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Index

Prioritized replay buffer

The next very useful idea on how to improve DQN training was proposed in 2015 in the paper Prioritized Experience Replay ([7] Schaul and others, 2015). This method tries to improve the efficiency of samples in the replay buffer by prioritizing those samples according to the training loss.

The basic DQN used the replay buffer to break the correlation between immediate transitions in our episodes. As we discussed in Chapter 6, Deep Q-Networks, the examples we experience during the episode will be highly correlated, as most of the time, the environment is "smooth" and doesn't change much according to our actions. However, the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method assumes that the data we use for training has an i.i.d. property. To solve this problem, the classic DQN method uses a large buffer of transitions, randomly sampled to get the next training batch.

The authors of the paper questioned this uniform random sample policy and proved...