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Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow
Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow

Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow: A beginner's guide to designing self-learning systems with TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym

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Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow

Training Reinforcement Learning Agents Using OpenAI Gym

The OpenAI Gym provides a lot of virtual environments to train your reinforcement learning agents. In reinforcement learning, the most difficult task is to create the environment. This is where OpenAI Gym comes to the rescue, by providing a lot of toy game environments to provide users with a platform to train and benchmark their reinforcement learning agents.

In other words, it provides a playground for the reinforcement learning agent to learn and benchmark their performance, where the agent has to learn to navigate from the start state to the goal state without undergoing any mishaps.

Thus, in this chapter, we will be learning to understand and use environments from OpenAI Gym and trying to implement basic Q-learning and the Q-network for our agents to learn.

OpenAI Gym provides different types of environments. They...

The OpenAI Gym

In order to download and install OpenAI Gym, you can use any of the following options:

$ git clone https://github.com/openai/gym 
$ cd gym
$ sudo pip install -e . # minimal install

This will do the minimum install. You can later run the following to do a full install:

$ sudo pip install -e .[all]

You can also fetch Gym as a package for different Python versions as follows:

For Python 2.7, you can use the following options:

$ sudo pip install gym              # minimal install 
$ sudo pip install gym[all] # full install
$ sudo pip install gym[atari] #for Atari specific environment installation

For Python 3.5, you can use the following options:

$ sudo pip3 install gym              # minimal install 
$ sudo pip3 install gym[all] # full install
$ sudo pip install gym[atari] #for Atari specific environment installation
...

Programming an agent using an OpenAI Gym environment

The environment considered for this section is the Frozen Lake v0. The actual documentation of the concerned environment can be found at https://gym.openai.com/envs/FrozenLake-v0/.

This environment consists of 4 x 4 grids representing a lake. Thus, we have 16 grid blocks, where each block can be a start block(S), frozen block(F), goal block(G), or a hole block(H). Thus, the objective of the agent is to learn to navigate from start to goal without falling in the hole:

import Gym
env = Gym.make('FrozenLake-v0') #loads the environment FrozenLake-v0
env.render() # will output the environment and position of the agent

-------------------
S
FFF FHFH FFFH HFFG

At any given state, an agent has four actions to perform, which are up, down, left, and right. The reward at each step is 0 except...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about OpenAI Gym, including the installation of different important functions to load, render, and understand the environment state-action spaces. We learned about the Epsilon-Greedy approach as a solution to the exploration-exploitation dilemma, and tried to implement a basic Q-learning and Q-network algorithm to train a reinforcement-learning agent to navigate an environment from OpenAI Gym.

In the next chapter, we will cover the most fundamental concepts in Reinforcement Learning, which include Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), Bellman Equation, and Markov Chain Monte Carlo.

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Key benefits

  • Explore reinforcement learning concepts and their implementation using TensorFlow
  • Discover different problem-solving methods for reinforcement learning
  • Apply reinforcement learning to autonomous driving cars, robobrokers, and more

Description

Reinforcement learning (RL) allows you to develop smart, quick and self-learning systems in your business surroundings. It's an effective method for training learning agents and solving a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence - from games, self-driving cars and robots, to enterprise applications such as data center energy saving (cooling data centers) and smart warehousing solutions. The book covers major advancements and successes achieved in deep reinforcement learning by synergizing deep neural network architectures with reinforcement learning. You'll also be introduced to the concept of reinforcement learning, its advantages and the reasons why it's gaining so much popularity. You'll explore MDPs, Monte Carlo tree searches, dynamic programming such as policy and value iteration, and temporal difference learning such as Q-learning and SARSA. You will use TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to build simple neural network models that learn from their own actions. You will also see how reinforcement learning algorithms play a role in games, image processing and NLP. By the end of this book, you will have gained a firm understanding of what reinforcement learning is and understand how to put your knowledge to practical use by leveraging the power of TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym.

Who is this book for?

If you want to get started with reinforcement learning using TensorFlow in the most practical way, this book will be a useful resource. The book assumes prior knowledge of machine learning and neural network programming concepts, as well as some understanding of the TensorFlow framework. No previous experience of reinforcement learning is required.

What you will learn

  • Implement state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms from the basics
  • Discover various reinforcement learning techniques such as MDP, Q Learning, and more
  • Explore the applications of reinforcement learning in advertisement, image processing, and NLP
  • Teach a reinforcement learning model to play a game using TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym
  • Understand how reinforcement learning applications are used in robotics
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Publication date : Apr 24, 2018
Length: 334 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788835725
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ISBN-13 : 9781788835725
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Table of Contents

16 Chapters
Deep Learning – Architectures and Frameworks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Training Reinforcement Learning Agents Using OpenAI Gym Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Markov Decision Process Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Policy Gradients Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Q-Learning and Deep Q-Networks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Asynchronous Methods Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Robo Everything – Real Strategy Gaming Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
AlphaGo – Reinforcement Learning at Its Best Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Driving Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Financial Portfolio Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deep Reinforcement Learning in Ad Tech Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Reinforcement Learning in Image Processing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deep Reinforcement Learning in NLP Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Further topics in Reinforcement Learning Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2.2
(5 Ratings)
5 star 20%
4 star 0%
3 star 20%
2 star 0%
1 star 60%
RT Aug 26, 2018
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Das Buch ist zu oberflächlich - die Konzepte werden nur unzureichend erklärt.Der Beispielcode ist nicht sinnvoll.Ich habe das Buch an Amazon zurückgeschickt
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Giang Dao Aug 19, 2018
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Not even re-produce quality paper result
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Santhosh Jul 23, 2018
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Not a good book to learn reinforcement learning or tensorflow. It does not discuss programming either. The book could be improved with an insight into the reinforcement learning concepts, at least to help the reader understand the concepts intuitively.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
siva Jul 17, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Must have book for RL learners
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Gadginir Jun 17, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
Book is above average after going through first 4 chapters. I felt it takes lot of time to understand the concepts. You will take 30 min to go through 2-3 pages sometime. With some more good examples, author can make it bit easier.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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