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Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On

You're reading from   Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On Apply modern RL methods, with deep Q-networks, value iteration, policy gradients, TRPO, AlphaGo Zero and more

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788834247
Length 546 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Maxim Lapan Maxim Lapan
Author Profile Icon Maxim Lapan
Maxim Lapan
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Table of Contents (21) Chapters Close

Preface 1. What is Reinforcement Learning? FREE CHAPTER 2. OpenAI Gym 3. Deep Learning with PyTorch 4. The Cross-Entropy Method 5. Tabular Learning and the Bellman Equation 6. Deep Q-Networks 7. DQN Extensions 8. Stocks Trading Using RL 9. Policy Gradients – An Alternative 10. The Actor-Critic Method 11. Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic 12. Chatbots Training with RL 13. Web Navigation 14. Continuous Action Space 15. Trust Regions – TRPO, PPO, and ACKTR 16. Black-Box Optimization in RL 17. Beyond Model-Free – Imagination 18. AlphaGo Zero Other Books You May Enjoy Index

Evolution strategies

The subset of black-box optimization methods is called evolution strategies (ES) and has been inspired by the evolution process, where the most successful individuals have the highest influence on the overall direction of the search. There are many different methods that fall into this class and in this chapter, we'll consider the approach taken by OpenAI researchers Tim Salimans, Jonathan Ho, and others in their paper, Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning [1], published in March 2017.

The underlying idea of ES methods is simple: on every iteration, we perform random perturbation of our current policy parameters and evaluate the resulting policy fitness function. Then we adjust the policy weights proportional to the relative fitness function value.

The concrete method used in the paper above is called Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) in which the perturbation performed is the random noise...

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