Distributional Reinforcement Learning

The first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, providing a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions from a probabilistic perspective. Distributional reinforcement learning is a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions. Going beyond the common approach to reinforcement learning and expected values, it focuses on the total reward or return obtained as a consequence of an agent's choices—specifically, how this return behaves from a probabilistic perspective. In this first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney, and Mark Rowland, who spearheaded development of the field, present its key concepts and review some of its many applications. They demonstrate its power to account for many complex, interesting phenomena that arise from interactions with one's environment. The authors present core ideas from classical reinforcement learning to contextualize distributional topics and include mathematical proofs pertaining to major results discussed in the text. They guide the reader through a series of algorithmic and mathematical developments that, in turn, characterize, compute, estimate, and make decisions on the basis of the random return. Practitioners in disciplines as diverse as finance (risk management), computational neuroscience, computational psychiatry, psychology, macroeconomics, and robotics are already using distributional reinforcement learning, paving the way for its expanding applications in mathematical finance, engineering, and the life sciences. More than a mathematical approach, distributional reinforcement learning represents a new perspective on how intelligent agents make predictions and decisions.

An example-rich guide for beginners to start their reinforcement and deep reinforcement learning journey with state-of-the-art distinct algorithms Key FeaturesCovers a vast spectrum of basic-to-advanced RL algorithms with mathematical explanations of each algorithmLearn how to implement algorithms with code by following examples with line-by-line explanationsExplore the latest RL methodologies such as DDPG, PPO, and the use of expert demonstrationsBook Description With significant enhancements in the quality and quantity of algorithms in recent years, this second edition of Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python has been revamped into an example-rich guide to learning state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) and deep RL algorithms with TensorFlow 2 and the OpenAI Gym toolkit. In addition to exploring RL basics and foundational concepts such as Bellman equation, Markov decision processes, and dynamic programming algorithms, this second edition dives deep into the full spectrum of value-based, policy-based, and actor-critic RL methods. It explores state-of-the-art algorithms such as DQN, TRPO, PPO and ACKTR, DDPG, TD3, and SAC in depth, demystifying the underlying math and demonstrating implementations through simple code examples. The book has several new chapters dedicated to new RL techniques, including distributional RL, imitation learning, inverse RL, and meta RL. You will learn to leverage stable baselines, an improvement of OpenAI’s baseline library, to effortlessly implement popular RL algorithms. The book concludes with an overview of promising approaches such as meta-learning and imagination augmented agents in research. By the end, you will become skilled in effectively employing RL and deep RL in your real-world projects. What you will learnUnderstand core RL concepts including the methodologies, math, and codeTrain an agent to solve Blackjack, FrozenLake, and many other problems using OpenAI GymTrain an agent to play Ms Pac-Man using a Deep Q NetworkLearn policy-based, value-based, and actor-critic methodsMaster the math behind DDPG, TD3, TRPO, PPO, and many othersExplore new avenues such as the distributional RL, meta RL, and inverse RLUse Stable Baselines to train an agent to walk and play Atari gamesWho this book is for If you’re a machine learning developer with little or no experience with neural networks interested in artificial intelligence and want to learn about reinforcement learning from scratch, this book is for you. Basic familiarity with linear algebra, calculus, and the Python programming language is required. Some experience with TensorFlow would be a plus.

Summary Humans learn best from feedback—we are encouraged to take actions that lead to positive results while deterred by decisions with negative consequences. This reinforcement process can be applied to computer programs allowing them to solve more complex problems that classical programming cannot. Deep Reinforcement Learning in Action teaches you the fundamental concepts and terminology of deep reinforcement learning, along with the practical skills and techniques you’ll need to implement it into your own projects. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology Deep reinforcement learning AI systems rapidly adapt to new environments, a vast improvement over standard neural networks. A DRL agent learns like people do, taking in raw data such as sensor input and refining its responses and predictions through trial and error. About the book Deep Reinforcement Learning in Action teaches you how to program AI agents that adapt and improve based on direct feedback from their environment. In this example-rich tutorial, you’ll master foundational and advanced DRL techniques by taking on interesting challenges like navigating a maze and playing video games. Along the way, you’ll work with core algorithms, including deep Q-networks and policy gradients, along with industry-standard tools like PyTorch and OpenAI Gym. What's inside Building and training DRL networks The most popular DRL algorithms for learning and problem solving Evolutionary algorithms for curiosity and multi-agent learning All examples available as Jupyter Notebooks About the reader For readers with intermediate skills in Python and deep learning. About the author Alexander Zai is a machine learning engineer at Amazon AI. Brandon Brown is a machine learning and data analysis blogger. Table of Contents PART 1 - FOUNDATIONS 1. What is reinforcement learning? 2. Modeling reinforcement learning problems: Markov decision processes 3. Predicting the best states and actions: Deep Q-networks 4. Learning to pick the best policy: Policy gradient methods 5. Tackling more complex problems with actor-critic methods PART 2 - ABOVE AND BEYOND 6. Alternative optimization methods: Evolutionary algorithms 7. Distributional DQN: Getting the full story 8.Curiosity-driven exploration 9. Multi-agent reinforcement learning 10. Interpretable reinforcement learning: Attention and relational models 11. In conclusion: A review and roadmap

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Distributed Artificial Intelligence, DAI 2021, held in Shanghai, China, in December 2021. The 15 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. DAI aims at bringing together international researchers and practitioners in related areas including general AI, multiagent systems, distributed learning, computational game theory, etc., to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of distributed AI.

Deep reinforcement learning has attracted considerable attention recently. Impressive results have been achieved in such diverse fields as autonomous driving, game playing, molecular recombination, and robotics. In all these fields, computer programs have taught themselves to understand problems that were previously considered to be very difficult. In the game of Go, the program AlphaGo has even learned to outmatch three of the world’s leading players.Deep reinforcement learning takes its inspiration from the fields of biology and psychology. Biology has inspired the creation of artificial neural networks and deep learning, while psychology studies how animals and humans learn, and how subjects’ desired behavior can be reinforced with positive and negative stimuli. When we see how reinforcement learning teaches a simulated robot to walk, we are reminded of how children learn, through playful exploration. Techniques that are inspired by biology and psychology work amazingly well in computers: animal behavior and the structure of the brain as new blueprints for science and engineering. In fact, computers truly seem to possess aspects of human behavior; as such, this field goes to the heart of the dream of artificial intelligence. These research advances have not gone unnoticed by educators. Many universities have begun offering courses on the subject of deep reinforcement learning. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the field, at the proper level of detail for a graduate course in artificial intelligence. It covers the complete field, from the basic algorithms of Deep Q-learning, to advanced topics such as multi-agent reinforcement learning and meta learning.

This research scholarly illustrated book has more than 250 illustrations. The simple models of supervised machine learning with Gaussian Naïve Bayes, Naïve Bayes, decision trees, classification rule learners, linear regression, logistic regression, local polynomial regression, regression trees, model trees, K-nearest neighbors, and support vector machines lay a more excellent foundation for statistics. The author of the book Dr. Ganapathi Pulipaka, a top influencer of machine learning in the US, has created this as a reference book for universities. This book contains an incredible foundation for machine learning and engineering beyond a compact manual. The author goes to extraordinary lengths to make academic machine learning and deep learning literature comprehensible to create a new body of knowledge. The book aims at readership from university students, enterprises, data science beginners, machine learning and deep learning engineers at scale for high-performance computing environments. A Greater Foundation of Machine Learning Engineering covers a broad range of classical linear algebra and calculus with program implementations in PyTorch, TensorFlow, R, and Python with in-depth coverage. The author does not hesitate to go into math equations for each algorithm at length that usually many foundational machine learning books lack leveraging the JupyterLab environment. Newcomers can leverage the book from University or people from all walks of data science or software lives to the advanced practitioners of machine learning and deep learning. Though the book title suggests machine learning, there are several implementations of deep learning algorithms, including deep reinforcement learning. The book's mission is to help build a strong foundation for machine learning and deep learning engineers with all the algorithms, processors to train and deploy into production for enterprise-wide machine learning implementations. This book also introduces all the concepts of natural language processing required for machine learning algorithms in Python. The book covers Bayesian statistics without assuming high-level mathematics or statistics experience from the readers. It delivers the core concepts and implementations required with R code with open datasets. The book also covers unsupervised machine learning algorithms with association rules and k-means clustering, metal-learning algorithms, bagging, boosting, random forests, and ensemble methods. The book delves into the origins of deep learning in a scholarly way covering neural networks, restricted Boltzmann machines, deep belief networks, autoencoders, deep Boltzmann machines, LSTM, and natural language processing techniques with deep learning algorithms and math equations. It leverages the NLTK library of Python with PyTorch, Python, and TensorFlow's installation steps, then demonstrates how to build neural networks with TensorFlow. Deploying machine learning algorithms require a blend of cloud computing platforms, SQL databases, and NoSQL databases. Any data scientist with a statistics background that looks to transition into a machine learning engineer role requires an in-depth understanding of machine learning project implementations on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft Azure cloud computing platforms. The book provides real-world client projects for understanding the complete implementation of machine learning algorithms. This book is a marvel that does not leave any application of machine learning and deep learning algorithms. It sets a more excellent foundation for newcomers and expands the horizons for experienced deep learning practitioners. It is almost inevitable that there will be a series of more advanced algorithms follow-up books from the author in some shape or form after setting such a perfect foundation for machine learning engineering.

The multi-volume set LNAI 14169 until 14175 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2023, which took place in Turin, Italy, in September 2023. The 196 papers were selected from the 829 submissions for the Research Track, and 58 papers were selected from the 239 submissions for the Applied Data Science Track. The volumes are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Active Learning; Adversarial Machine Learning; Anomaly Detection; Applications; Bayesian Methods; Causality; Clustering. Part II: ​Computer Vision; Deep Learning; Fairness; Federated Learning; Few-shot learning; Generative Models; Graph Contrastive Learning. Part III: ​Graph Neural Networks; Graphs; Interpretability; Knowledge Graphs; Large-scale Learning. Part IV: ​Natural Language Processing; Neuro/Symbolic Learning; Optimization; Recommender Systems; Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning. Part V: ​Robustness; Time Series; Transfer and Multitask Learning. Part VI: ​Applied Machine Learning; Computational Social Sciences; Finance; Hardware and Systems; Healthcare & Bioinformatics; Human-Computer Interaction; Recommendation and Information Retrieval. ​Part VII: Sustainability, Climate, and Environment.- Transportation & Urban Planning.- Demo.