What this book covers

Chapter 1, What Is Reinforcement Learning?, contains an introduction to RL ideas and the main formal models.

Chapter 2, OpenAI Gym, introduces the practical aspects of RL, using the open source library Gym.

Chapter 3, Deep Learning with PyTorch, gives a quick overview of the PyTorch library.

Chapter 4, The Cross-Entropy Method, introduces one of the simplest methods in RL to give you an impression of RL methods and problems.

Chapter 5, Tabular Learning and the Bellman Equation, introduces the value-based family of RL methods.

Chapter 6, Deep Q-Networks, describes deep Q-networks (DQNs), an extension of the basic value-based methods, allowing us to solve a complicated environment.

Chapter 7, Higher-Level RL Libraries, describes the library PTAN, which we will use in the book to simplify the implementations of RL methods.

Chapter 8, DQN Extensions, gives a detailed overview of a modern extension to the DQN method, to improve its stability and convergence in complex environments.

Chapter 9, Ways to Speed up RL Methods, provides an overview of ways to make the execution of RL code faster.

Chapter 10, Stocks Trading Using RL, is the first practical project and focuses on applying the DQN method to stock trading.

Chapter 11, Policy Gradients—an Alternative, introduces another family of RL methods that is based on policy learning.

Chapter 12, The Actor-Critic Method, describes one of the most widely used methods in RL.

Chapter 13, Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic, extends the actor-critic method with parallel environment communication, which improves stability and convergence.

Chapter 14, Training Chatbots with RL, is the second project and shows how to apply RL methods to natural language processing problems.

Chapter 15, The TextWorld Environment, covers the application of RL methods to interactive fiction games.

Chapter 16, Web Navigation, is another long project that applies RL to web page navigation using the MiniWoB set of tasks.

Chapter 17, Continuous Action Space, describes the specifics of environments using continuous action spaces and various methods.

Chapter 18, RL in Robotics, covers the application of RL methods to robotics problems. In this chapter, I describe the process of building and training a small hardware robot with RL methods.

Chapter 19, Trust Regions – PPO, TRPO, ACKTR, and SAC, is yet another chapter about continuous action spaces describing the trust region set of methods.

Chapter 20, Black-Box Optimization in RL, shows another set of methods that don’t use gradients in their explicit form.

Chapter 21, Advanced Exploration, covers different approaches that can be used for better exploration of the environment.

Chapter 22, Beyond Model-Free – Imagination, introduces the model-based approach to RL and uses recent research results about imagination in RL.

Chapter 23, AlphaGo Zero, describes the AlphaGo Zero method and applies it to the game Connect 4.

Chapter 24, RL in Discrete Optimization, describes the application of RL methods to the domain of discrete optimization, using the Rubik’s Cube as an environment.

Chapter 25, Multi-agent RL, introduces a relatively new direction of RL methods for situations with multiple agents.