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

Reinforcement Learning Frontiers

Congratulations! You have made it to the final chapter. We have come a long way. We started off with the fundamentals of reinforcement learning and gradually we learned about the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms. In this chapter, we will look at some exciting and promising research trends in reinforcement learning. We will start the chapter by learning what meta learning is and how it differs from other learning paradigms. Then, we will learn about one of the most used meta-learning algorithms, called Model-Agnostic Meta Learning (MAML).

We will understand MAML in detail, and then we will see how to apply it in a reinforcement learning setting. Following this, we will learn about hierarchical reinforcement learning, and we look into a popular hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm called MAXQ value function decomposition.

At the end of the chapter, we will look at an interesting algorithm called Imagination ...