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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

Why a continuous space?

All the examples that we have seen so far in the book had a discrete action space, so you might have the wrong impression that discrete actions dominate the field. This is a very biased view, of course, and just reflects the selection of domains that we picked our test problems from. Besides Atari games and simple, classic RL problems, there are many tasks that require more than just making a selection from a small and discrete set of things to do.

To give you an example, just imagine a simple robot with only one controllable joint that can be rotated in some range of degrees. Usually, to control a physical joint, you have to specify either the desired position or the force applied.

In both cases, you need to make a decision about a continuous value. This value is fundamentally different from a discrete action space, as the set of values on which you can make a decision is potentially infinite. For instance, you could ask the joint to move to a 13.5&...

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