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

A Primer on TensorFlow

TensorFlow is one of the most popular deep learning libraries. In upcoming chapters, we will use TensorFlow to build deep reinforcement models. So, in this chapter, we will get ourselves familiar with TensorFlow and its functionalities.

We will learn about what computational graphs are and how TensorFlow uses them. We will also explore TensorBoard, which is a visualization tool provided by TensorFlow used for visualizing models. Going forward, we will understand how to build a neural network with TensorFlow to perform handwritten digit classification.

Moving on, we will learn about TensorFlow 2.0, which is the latest version of TensorFlow. We will understand how TensorFlow 2.0 differs from its previous versions and how it uses Keras as its high-level API.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following:

  • TensorFlow
  • Computational graphs and sessions
  • Variables, constants, and placeholders
  • TensorBoard
  • Handwritten...