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, with deep Q-networks, value iteration, policy gradients, TRPO, AlphaGo Zero and more

Arrow left icon
Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788834247
Length 546 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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 (21) Chapters Close

Preface 1. What is Reinforcement Learning? FREE CHAPTER 2. OpenAI Gym 3. Deep Learning with PyTorch 4. The Cross-Entropy Method 5. Tabular Learning and the Bellman Equation 6. Deep Q-Networks 7. DQN Extensions 8. Stocks Trading Using RL 9. Policy Gradients – An Alternative 10. The Actor-Critic Method 11. Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic 12. Chatbots Training with RL 13. Web Navigation 14. Continuous Action Space 15. Trust Regions – TRPO, PPO, and ACKTR 16. Black-Box Optimization in RL 17. Beyond Model-Free – Imagination 18. AlphaGo Zero Other Books You May Enjoy Index

Black-box methods

In the beginning, let's discuss the whole family of methods and how they differ from what we've seen so far. Black-box optimization methods are the general approach to the optimization problem, when you treat the objective that you're optimizing as a black box, without any assumption about the differentiability, value function, smoothness of the objective, and so on. The only requirement that those methods expose is the ability to calculate the fitness function, which should give us the measure of suitability of a particular instance of the optimized entity at hand.

One of the simplest examples of the method in this family is random search, which is when you randomly sample the thing you're looking for (in the case of RL it's the policy Black-box methods), then you check the fitness of this candidate, and if the result is good enough (according to some reward criteria), then you're done. Otherwise, you repeat the process...

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 $19.99/month. Cancel anytime