Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
Chapter 1: Foundations of Reinforcement Learning
What is Reinforcement Learning?
Agents and Environments
States, Actions, and Rewards
Policies: Mapping States to Actions
The RL Workflow: Interaction Loops
Types of RL Tasks: Episodic vs Continuing
Comparing RL with Other Learning Types
Setting up Your Python Environment for RL
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Markov Decision Processes (MDPs)
Modeling Sequential Decision Making
Formal Definition of an MDP
State Transition Probabilities
Reward Functions
Return: Cumulative Future Rewards
Discounting Future Rewards
Policies and Value Functions (Vπ, Qπ)
Finding Optimal Policies
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Estimating Value Functions
The Bellman Expectation Equation
The Bellman Optimality Equation
Solving Bellman Equations (Overview)
Dynamic Programming: Policy Iteration
Dynamic Programming: Value Iteration
Limitations of Dynamic Programming
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Monte Carlo Methods
Learning from Complete Episodes
Monte Carlo Prediction: Estimating Vπ
Monte Carlo Control: Estimating Qπ
On-Policy vs Off-Policy Learning
MC Control without Exploring Starts
On-Policy First-Visit MC Control Implementation
Off-Policy MC Prediction and Control Intro
Practice: Implementing MC Prediction
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Temporal-Difference Learning
Learning from Incomplete Episodes
TD(0) Prediction: Estimating Vπ
Advantages of TD Learning over MC
SARSA: On-Policy TD Control
Q-Learning: Off-Policy TD Control
Comparing SARSA and Q-Learning
Expected SARSA
Hands-on Practical: Implementing Q-Learning
Quiz for Chapter 5
Chapter 6: Function Approximation in RL
Handling Large State Spaces
Value Function Approximation (VFA)
Feature Vectors for State Representation
Linear Methods for VFA
Gradient Descent for Parameter Learning
Semi-gradient TD Methods
Using Neural Networks for VFA
Practice: Applying Linear VFA
Quiz for Chapter 6
Chapter 7: Introduction to Deep Q-Networks (DQN)
Combining Q-Learning with Deep Learning
Challenges with Neural Networks in RL
Experience Replay Mechanism
Fixed Q-Targets (Target Networks)
The DQN Algorithm Structure
Architectural Considerations for DQNs
Hands-on Practical: Building a Basic DQN
Quiz for Chapter 7
Chapter 8: Introduction to Policy Gradient Methods
Learning Policies Directly
Policy Gradient Theorem (Concept)
REINFORCE Algorithm
Baselines for Variance Reduction
Actor-Critic Methods Overview
Comparing Value-Based and Policy-Based Methods
Practice: Implementing REINFORCE
Quiz for Chapter 8
Comparing Value-Based and Policy-Based Methods
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- Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto, 2018 (MIT Press) - A comprehensive textbook on the theoretical foundations and algorithms of both value-based and policy-based reinforcement learning methods, including their detailed comparison.
- Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning, Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Andrei A. Rusu, Joel Veness, Marc G. Bellemare, Alex Graves, Martin Riedmiller, Andreas K. Fidjeland, Georg Ostrovski, Stig Petersen, Charles Beattie, Amazed van den Heuvel, Demis Hassabis, and Daan Wierstra, 2015 Nature, Vol. 518 DOI: 10.1038/nature14236 - This paper presents Deep Q-Networks (DQN), illustrating how value-based methods are extended with deep learning, and discusses challenges like instability and solutions like experience replay.
- Actor-Critic Algorithms, Vijay R. Konda, John N. Tsitsiklis, 2000 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vol. 12 (The MIT Press) - A foundational paper on Actor-Critic architectures, which combine elements of both policy-based and value-based methods to enhance learning stability and efficiency.