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

Chapter 2 – A Guide to the Gym Toolkit

  1. The Gym toolkit provides a variety of environments for training the RL agent ranging from classic control tasks to Atari game environments. We can train our RL agent to learn in these simulated environments using various RL algorithms.
  2. We can create a Gym environment using the make function. The make function requires the environment ID as a parameter.
  3. We learned that the action space consists of all the possible actions in the environment. We can obtain the action space by using env.action_space.
  4. We can visualize the Gym environment using the render() function.
  5. Some classic control environments offered by Gym include the cart pole balancing environment, the pendulum, and the mountain car environment.
  6. We can generate an episode by selecting an action in each state using the step() function.
  7. The state space of the Atari environment will be either the game screen's pixel values or the RAM...