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

Summary

We started the chapter by understanding the basic idea of RL. We learned that RL is a trial and error learning process and the learning in RL happens based on a reward. We then explored the difference between RL and the other ML paradigms, such as supervised and unsupervised learning. Going ahead, we learned about the MDP and how the RL environment can be modeled as an MDP. Next, we understood several important fundamental concepts involved in RL, and at the end of the chapter we looked into some real-life applications of RL.

Thus, in this chapter, we have learned several fundamental concepts of RL. In the next chapter, we will begin our Hands-on reinforcement learning journey by implementing all the fundamental concepts we have learned in this chapter using the popular toolkit called Gym.