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

Dynamic programming

Dynamic programming (DP) is a technique for solving complex problems. In DP, instead of solving a complex problem as a whole, we break the problem into simple sub-problems, then for each sub-problem, we compute and store the solution. If the same subproblem occurs, we don't recompute; instead, we use the already computed solution. Thus, DP helps in drastically minimizing the computation time. It has its applications in a wide variety of fields including computer science, mathematics, bioinformatics, and so on.

Now, we will learn about two important methods that use DP to find the optimal policy. The two methods are:

  • Value iteration
  • Policy iteration

Note that dynamic programming is a model-based method meaning that it will help us to find the optimal policy only when the model dynamics (transition probability) of the environment are known. If we don't have the model dynamics, we cannot apply DP methods.

The...