Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Python - Second Edition

By : Sudharsan Ravichandiran
Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Python - Second Edition

By: Sudharsan Ravichandiran

Overview of this book

With significant enhancements in the quality and quantity of algorithms in recent years, this second edition of Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python has been revamped into an example-rich guide to learning state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) and deep RL algorithms with TensorFlow 2 and the OpenAI Gym toolkit. In addition to exploring RL basics and foundational concepts such as Bellman equation, Markov decision processes, and dynamic programming algorithms, this second edition dives deep into the full spectrum of value-based, policy-based, and actor-critic RL methods. It explores state-of-the-art algorithms such as DQN, TRPO, PPO and ACKTR, DDPG, TD3, and SAC in depth, demystifying the underlying math and demonstrating implementations through simple code examples. The book has several new chapters dedicated to new RL techniques, including distributional RL, imitation learning, inverse RL, and meta RL. You will learn to leverage stable baselines, an improvement of OpenAI’s baseline library, to effortlessly implement popular RL algorithms. The book concludes with an overview of promising approaches such as meta-learning and imagination augmented agents in research. By the end, you will become skilled in effectively employing RL and deep RL in your real-world projects.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
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Index

Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is one of the areas of Machine Learning (ML). Unlike other ML paradigms, such as supervised and unsupervised learning, RL works in a trial and error fashion by interacting with its environment.

RL is one of the most active areas of research in artificial intelligence, and it is believed that RL will take us a step closer towards achieving artificial general intelligence. RL has evolved rapidly in the past few years with a wide variety of applications ranging from building a recommendation system to self-driving cars. The major reason for this evolution is the advent of deep reinforcement learning, which is a combination of deep learning and RL. With the emergence of new RL algorithms and libraries, RL is clearly one of the most promising areas of ML.

In this chapter, we will build a strong foundation in RL by exploring several important and fundamental concepts involved in RL.

In this chapter, we will cover...