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

The PTAN library

The library is available in GitHub: https://github.com/Shmuma/ptan. All the subsequent examples were implemented using version 0.6 of PTAN, which can be installed in your virtual environment by running the following:

pip install ptan==0.6

The original goal of PTAN was to simplify my RL experiments, and it tries to keep the balance between two extremes:

Import the library and then write one line with tons of parameters to train one of the provided methods, like DQN (a very vivid example is the OpenAI Baselines project)
Implement everything from scratch

The first approach is very inflexible. It works well when you are using the library the way it is supposed to be used. But if you want to do something fancy, you will quickly find yourself hacking the library and fighting with the constraints that I imposed, rather than solving the problem you want to solve.

The second extreme gives too much freedom and requires implementing replay buffers...