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

Product type Paperback

Published in Jan 2020

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781838826994

Length 826 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

Deep Reinforcement Learning

Concepts

Chatbots

Author (1):

Maxim Lapan

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Table of Contents (28) Chapters

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

Robots and robotics

I'm sure you know what the word "robot" means and have seen them both in real life and in science fiction movies. Putting aside fictitious ones, there are many robots in industry (check "Tesla assembly line" on YouTube), the military (if you haven't seen the Boston Dynamics videos, you should stop reading and check them out), agriculture, medicine, and our homes. Automatic vacuum cleaners, modern coffee machines, 3D printers, and many other applications are examples of specialized mechanisms with complicated logic that are driven by some kind of software. At a high level, all those robots have common features, which we're going to discuss. Of course, this kind of classification is not perfect. As is often the case, there are lots of outliers that might fulfill the given criteria, but could still hardly be considered as robots.

Firstly, robots are connected to the world around them with some kind of sensors or other communication...