Book Image

TensorFlow 2 Reinforcement Learning Cookbook

By : Palanisamy P
Book Image

TensorFlow 2 Reinforcement Learning Cookbook

By: Palanisamy P

Overview of this book

With deep reinforcement learning, you can build intelligent agents, products, and services that can go beyond computer vision or perception to perform actions. TensorFlow 2.x is the latest major release of the most popular deep learning framework used to develop and train deep neural networks (DNNs). This book contains easy-to-follow recipes for leveraging TensorFlow 2.x to develop artificial intelligence applications. Starting with an introduction to the fundamentals of deep reinforcement learning and TensorFlow 2.x, the book covers OpenAI Gym, model-based RL, model-free RL, and how to develop basic agents. You'll discover how to implement advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms such as actor-critic, deep deterministic policy gradients, deep-Q networks, proximal policy optimization, and deep recurrent Q-networks for training your RL agents. As you advance, you’ll explore the applications of reinforcement learning by building cryptocurrency trading agents, stock/share trading agents, and intelligent agents for automating task completion. Finally, you'll find out how to deploy deep reinforcement learning agents to the cloud and build cross-platform apps using TensorFlow 2.x. By the end of this TensorFlow book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of deep reinforcement learning algorithms and their implementations from scratch.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Implementing the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm and A3C agent

The A3C algorithm builds upon the Actor-Critic class of algorithms by using a neural network to approximate the actor (and critic). The actor learns the policy function using a deep neural network, while the critic estimates the value function. The asynchronous nature of the algorithm allows the agent to learn from different parts of the state space, allowing parallel learning and faster convergence. Unlike DQN agents, which use an experience replay memory, the A3C agent uses multiple workers to gather more samples for learning. By the end of this recipe, you will have a complete script to train an A3C agent for any continuous action valued environment of your choice!

Getting ready

To complete this recipe, you will first need to activate the tf2rl-cookbook Conda Python virtual environment and pip install -r requirements.txt. If the following import statements run without issues, you are ready to get...