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

Deep Learning Foundations

So far in the previous chapters, we have learned how several reinforcement learning algorithms work and how they find the optimal policy. In the upcoming chapters, we will learn about Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), which is a combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning. To understand DRL, we need to have a strong foundation in deep learning. So, in this chapter, we will learn several important deep learning algorithms.

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning and it is all about neural networks. Deep learning has been around for a decade, but the reason it is so popular right now is because of the computational advancements and availability of huge volumes of data. With this huge volume of data, deep learning algorithms can outperform classic machine learning algorithms.

We will start off the chapter by understanding what biological and artificial neurons are, and then we will learn about Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and...