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Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. - Second Edition

You're reading from  Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. - Second Edition

Product type Book
Published in Jan 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781838826994
Pages 826 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Author (1):
Maxim Lapan Maxim Lapan
Profile icon Maxim Lapan

Table of Contents (28) Chapters

Preface 1. What Is Reinforcement Learning? 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. 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

Adding an extra A to A2C

From the practical point of view, communicating with several parallel environments is simple. We already did this in the previous chapter, but it wasn't explicitly stated. In the A2C agent, we passed an array of Gym environments into the ExperienceSource class, which switched it into round-robin data gathering mode. This means that every time we ask for a transition from the experience source, the class uses the next environment from our array (of course, keeping the state for every environment). This simple approach is equivalent to parallel communication with environments, but with one single difference: communication is not parallel in the strict sense but performed in a serial way. However, samples from our experience source are shuffled. This idea is shown in the following diagram:

Figure 13.1: An agent training from multiple environments in parallel

This method works fine and helped us to get convergence in the A2C method, but it is still...

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