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)
18
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19
Index

The basic idea of RL

Let's begin with an analogy. Let's suppose we are teaching a dog (agent) to catch a ball. Instead of teaching the dog explicitly to catch a ball, we just throw a ball and every time the dog catches the ball, we give the dog a cookie (reward). If the dog fails to catch the ball, then we do not give it a cookie. So, the dog will figure out what action caused it to receive a cookie and repeat that action. Thus, the dog will understand that catching the ball caused it to receive a cookie and will attempt to repeat catching the ball. Thus, in this way, the dog will learn to catch a ball while aiming to maximize the cookies it can receive.

Similarly, in an RL setting, we will not teach the agent what to do or how to do it; instead, we will give a reward to the agent for every action it does. We will give a positive reward to the agent when it performs a good action and we will give a negative reward to the agent when it performs a bad action. The agent...