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

Exploring activation functions

An activation function, also known as a transfer function, plays a vital role in neural networks. It is used to introduce non-linearity in neural networks. As we learned before, we apply the activation function to the input, which is multiplied by weights and added to the bias, that is, f(z), where z = (input * weights) + bias and f(.) is the activation function.

If we do not apply the activation function, then a neuron simply resembles the linear regression. The aim of the activation function is to introduce a non-linear transformation to learn the complex underlying patterns in the data.

Now let's look at some of the interesting commonly used activation functions.

The sigmoid function

The sigmoid function is one of the most commonly used activation functions. It scales the value between 0 and 1. The sigmoid function can be defined as follows:

It is an S-shaped curve shown in Figure 7.4:

Figure 7.4: Sigmoid function...