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You're reading from  Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python

Product typeBook
Published inDec 2020
Reading LevelBeginner
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781838644147
Edition1st Edition
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Enes Bilgin
Enes Bilgin
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Enes Bilgin

Enes Bilgin works as a senior AI engineer and a tech lead in Microsoft's Autonomous Systems division. He is a machine learning and operations research practitioner and researcher with experience in building production systems and models for top tech companies using Python, TensorFlow, and Ray/RLlib. He holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in systems engineering from Boston University and a B.S. in industrial engineering from Bilkent University. In the past, he has worked as a research scientist at Amazon and as an operations research scientist at AMD. He also held adjunct faculty positions at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Ingram School of Engineering at Texas State University.
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When we learn a new skill, we start with basics. Bouncing and dribbling are the first steps while learning basketball. Doing alley-oops is not something to try to teach in the first lesson. One needs to gradually proceed to advanced lessons, after feeling comfortable with the earlier ones. This idea of following a curriculum, from basics to advanced levels, is the basis of the whole education system. The question is whether machine learning models can benefit from the same approach. It turns out that they can!

In the context of RL, when we create a curriculum, we similarly start with "easy" environment configurations for the agent. This way the agent can get an idea about what success means early on, rather than spending a lot of time by blindly exploring the environment with the hope of stumbling upon success. We then gradually increase the difficulty if we observe the agent is exceeding a certain reward threshold. Each of these difficulty levels are...

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Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python
Published in: Dec 2020Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781838644147

Author (1)

author image
Enes Bilgin

Enes Bilgin works as a senior AI engineer and a tech lead in Microsoft's Autonomous Systems division. He is a machine learning and operations research practitioner and researcher with experience in building production systems and models for top tech companies using Python, TensorFlow, and Ray/RLlib. He holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in systems engineering from Boston University and a B.S. in industrial engineering from Bilkent University. In the past, he has worked as a research scientist at Amazon and as an operations research scientist at AMD. He also held adjunct faculty positions at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Ingram School of Engineering at Texas State University.
Read more about Enes Bilgin