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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 RL libraries?

Our implementation of basic DQN in Chapter 6, Deep Q-Networks wasn't very, long and complicated—about 200 lines of training code plus 120 lines in environment wrappers. When you are becoming familiar with RL methods, it is very useful to implement everything yourself to understand how things actually work. However, the more involved you become in the field, the more often you will realize that you are writing the same code over and over again.

This repetition comes from the generality of RL methods. As we already discussed in Chapter 1, What Is Reinforcement Learning?, RL is quite flexible and many real-life problems fall into the environment-agent interaction scheme. RL methods don't make many assumptions about the specifics of observations and actions, so code implemented for the CartPole environment will be applicable to Atari games (maybe with some minor tweaks).

Writing the same code over and over again is not very efficient, as bugs might...

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