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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

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781838826994
Length 826 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
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Author (1):
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Maxim Lapan Maxim Lapan
Author Profile Icon Maxim Lapan
Maxim Lapan
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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

Ways to Speed up RL

In Chapter 8, DQN Extensions, you saw several practical tricks to make the deep Q-network (DQN) method more stable and converge faster. They involved the basic DQN method modifications (like injecting noise into the network or unrolling the Bellman equation) to get a better policy, with less time spent on training. But there is another way: tweaking the implementation details of the method to improve the speed of the training. This is a pure engineering approach, but it's also important in practice.

In this chapter, we will:

  • Take the Pong environment from Chapter 8 and try to get it solved as fast as possible
  • In a step-by-step manner, get Pong solved 3.5 times faster using exactly the same commodity hardware
  • Discuss fancier ways to speed up reinforcement learning (RL) training that could become common in the future
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