Elements of RL

The elements of RL are shown in the following sections.

Agent

Agents are the software programs that make intelligent decisions and they are basically learners in RL. Agents take action by interacting with the environment and they receive rewards based on their actions, for example, Super Mario navigating in a video game.

Policy function

A policy defines the agent's behavior in an environment. The way in which the agent decides which action to perform depends on the policy. Say you want to reach your office from home; there will be different routes to reach your office, and some routes are shortcuts, while some routes are long. These routes are called policies because they represent the way in which we choose to perform an action to reach our goal. A policy is often denoted by the symbol 𝛑. A policy can be in the form of a lookup table or a complex search process.

Value function

A value function denotes how good it is for an agent to be in a particular state. It is dependent on the policy and is often denoted by v(s). It is equal to the total expected reward received by the agent starting from the initial state. There can be several value functions; the optimal value function is the one that has the highest value for all the states compared to other value functions. Similarly, an optimal policy is the one that has the optimal value function.

Model

Model is the agent's representation of an environment. The learning can be of two types—model-based learning and model-free learning. In model-based learning, the agent exploits previously learned information to accomplish a task, whereas in model-free learning, the agent simply relies on a trial-and-error experience for performing the right action. Say you want to reach your office from home faster. In model-based learning, you simply use a previously learned experience (map) to reach the office faster, whereas in model-free learning you will not use a previous experience and will try all different routes and choose the faster one.