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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Index

Applications of RL

RL has evolved rapidly over the past couple of years with a wide range of applications ranging from playing games to self-driving cars. One of the major reasons for this evolution is due to Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), which is a combination of RL and deep learning. We will learn about the various state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms in the upcoming chapters, so be excited! In this section, we will look at some real-life applications of RL:

  • Manufacturing: In manufacturing, intelligent robots are trained using RL to place objects in the right position. The use of intelligent robots reduces labor costs and increases productivity.
  • Dynamic pricing: One of the popular applications of RL is dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing implies that we change the price of products based on demand and supply. We can train the RL agent for the dynamic pricing of products with the goal of maximizing revenue.
  • Inventory management: RL is used extensively in inventory...