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

Ways to Speed up RL

In Chapter 8, DQN Extensions, you saw several practical tricks to make the deep Q-network (DQN) method more stable and converge faster. They involved the basic DQN method modifications (like injecting noise into the network or unrolling the Bellman equation) to get a better policy, with less time spent on training. But there is another way: tweaking the implementation details of the method to improve the speed of the training. This is a pure engineering approach, but it's also important in practice.

In this chapter, we will:

  • Take the Pong environment from Chapter 8 and try to get it solved as fast as possible
  • In a step-by-step manner, get Pong solved 3.5 times faster using exactly the same commodity hardware
  • Discuss fancier ways to speed up reinforcement learning (RL) training that could become common in the future