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You're reading from  Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python

Product typeBook
Published inJun 2018
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781788836524
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Sudharsan Ravichandiran
Sudharsan Ravichandiran
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Sudharsan Ravichandiran

Sudharsan Ravichandiran is a data scientist and artificial intelligence enthusiast. He holds a Bachelors in Information Technology from Anna University. His area of research focuses on practical implementations of deep learning and reinforcement learning including natural language processing and computer vision. He is an open-source contributor and loves answering questions on Stack Overflow.
Read more about Sudharsan Ravichandiran

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Proximal Policy Optimization

Now we will look at another policy optimization algorithm called Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). It acts as an improvement to TRPO and has become the default RL algorithm of choice in solving many complex RL problems due to its performance. It was proposed by researchers at OpenAI for overcoming the shortcomings of TRPO. Recall the surrogate objective function of TRPO. It is a constraint optimization problem where we impose a constraint—that average KL divergence between the old and new policy should be less than . But the problem with TRPO is that it requires a lot of computing power for computing conjugate gradients to perform constrained optimization.

So, PPO modifies the objective function of TRPO by changing the constraint to a penalty term so that we don't want to perform conjugate gradient. Now let's see how PPO works....

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Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python
Published in: Jun 2018Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781788836524

Author (1)

author image
Sudharsan Ravichandiran

Sudharsan Ravichandiran is a data scientist and artificial intelligence enthusiast. He holds a Bachelors in Information Technology from Anna University. His area of research focuses on practical implementations of deep learning and reinforcement learning including natural language processing and computer vision. He is an open-source contributor and loves answering questions on Stack Overflow.
Read more about Sudharsan Ravichandiran