Search icon CANCEL
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Conferences
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
Arrow up icon
GO TO TOP
Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On

You're reading from   Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On Apply modern RL methods to practical problems of chatbots, robotics, discrete optimization, web automation, and more

Arrow left icon
Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781838826994
Length 826 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Concepts
Arrow right icon
Author (1):
Arrow left icon
Maxim Lapan Maxim Lapan
Author Profile Icon Maxim Lapan
Maxim Lapan
Arrow right icon
View More author details
Toc

Table of Contents (28) Chapters Close

Preface 1. What Is Reinforcement Learning? 2. OpenAI Gym FREE CHAPTER 3. Deep Learning with PyTorch 4. The Cross-Entropy Method 5. Tabular Learning and the Bellman Equation 6. Deep Q-Networks 7. Higher-Level RL Libraries 8. DQN Extensions 9. Ways to Speed up RL 10. Stocks Trading Using RL 11. Policy Gradients – an Alternative 12. The Actor-Critic Method 13. Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic 14. Training Chatbots with RL 15. The TextWorld Environment 16. Web Navigation 17. Continuous Action Space 18. RL in Robotics 19. Trust Regions – PPO, TRPO, ACKTR, and SAC 20. Black-Box Optimization in RL 21. Advanced Exploration 22. Beyond Model-Free – Imagination 23. AlphaGo Zero 24. RL in Discrete Optimization 25. Multi-agent RL 26. Other Books You May Enjoy
27. Index

Why RL libraries?

Our implementation of basic DQN in Chapter 6, Deep Q-Networks wasn't very, long and complicated—about 200 lines of training code plus 120 lines in environment wrappers. When you are becoming familiar with RL methods, it is very useful to implement everything yourself to understand how things actually work. However, the more involved you become in the field, the more often you will realize that you are writing the same code over and over again.

This repetition comes from the generality of RL methods. As we already discussed in Chapter 1, What Is Reinforcement Learning?, RL is quite flexible and many real-life problems fall into the environment-agent interaction scheme. RL methods don't make many assumptions about the specifics of observations and actions, so code implemented for the CartPole environment will be applicable to Atari games (maybe with some minor tweaks).

Writing the same code over and over again is not very efficient, as bugs might...

lock icon The rest of the chapter is locked
Register for a free Packt account to unlock a world of extra content!
A free Packt account unlocks extra newsletters, articles, discounted offers, and much more. Start advancing your knowledge today.
Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days
Get unlimited access to 7000+ expert-authored eBooks and videos courses covering every tech area you can think of
Renews at €18.99/month. Cancel anytime