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

The Bellman equation

The Bellman equation, named after Richard Bellman, helps us solve the Markov decision process (MDP). When we say solve the MDP, we mean finding the optimal policy.

As stated in the introduction of the chapter, the Bellman equation is ubiquitous in reinforcement learning and is widely used for finding the optimal value and Q functions recursively. Computing the optimal value and Q functions is very important because once we have the optimal value or optimal Q function, then we can use them to derive the optimal policy.

In this section, we'll learn what exactly the Bellman equation is and how we can use it to find the optimal value and Q functions.

The Bellman equation of the value function

The Bellman equation states that the value of a state can be obtained as a sum of the immediate reward and the discounted value of the next state. Say we perform an action a in state s and move to the next state and obtain a reward r, then...