Modern Reinforcement Learning: Deep Q Agents (PyTorch & TF2)

How to Turn Deep Reinforcement Learning Research Papers Into Agents That Beat Classic Atari Games

In this complete deep reinforcement learning course you will learn a repeatable framework for reading and implementing deep reinforcement learning research papers. You will read the original papers that introduced the Deep Q learning, Double Deep Q learning, and Dueling Deep Q learning algorithms. You will then learn how to implement these in pythonic and concise PyTorch and Tensorflow 2 code, that can be extended to include any future deep Q learning algorithms. These algorithms will be used to solve a variety of environments from the Open AI gym's Atari library, including Pong, Breakout, and Bankheist.

You will learn the key to making these Deep Q Learning algorithms work, which is how to modify the Open AI Gym's Atari library to meet the specifications of the original Deep Q Learning papers. You will learn how to:

• Repeat actions to reduce computational overhead

• Rescale the Atari screen images to increase efficiency

• Stack frames to give the Deep Q agent a sense of motion

• Evaluate the Deep Q agent's performance with random no-ops to deal with model over training

• Clip rewards to enable the Deep Q learning agent to generalize across Atari games with different score scales

  
  

If you do not have prior experience in reinforcement or deep reinforcement learning, that's no problem. Included in the course is a complete and concise course on the fundamentals of reinforcement learning. The introductory course in reinforcement learning will be taught in the context of solving the Frozen Lake environment from the Open AI Gym.

We will cover:

• Markov decision processes

• Temporal difference learning

• The original Q learning algorithm

• How to solve the Bellman equation

• Value functions and action value functions

• Model free vs. model based reinforcement learning

• Solutions to the explore-exploit dilemma, including optimistic initial values and epsilon-greedy action selection

Also included is a mini course in deep learning using the PyTorch framework. This is geared for students who are familiar with the basic concepts of deep learning, but not the specifics, or those who are comfortable with deep learning in another framework, such as Tensorflow or Keras. You will learn how to code a deep neural network in Pytorch as well as how convolutional neural networks function. This will be put to use in implementing a naive Deep Q learning agent to solve the Cartpole problem from the Open AI gym.