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Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On
book

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On

by Oleg Vasilev, Maxim Lapan, Martijn van Otterlo, Mikhail Yurushkin, Basem O. F. Alijla
June 2018
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
546 pages
13h 30m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On

Chapter 9. Policy Gradients – An Alternative

In this first chapter of part three of the book, we’ll consider an alternative way to handle Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, which forms a full family of methods called Policy Gradients (PG). The chapter will present an overview of the methods, their motivation, and their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to the already familiar Q-learning. We will start with a simple PG method called REINFORCE and will try to apply it to our CartPole environment, comparing this with the Deep Q-Networks (DQN) approach.

Values and policy

Before we start talking about (PG), let’s refresh our minds with the common characteristics of the methods covered in part two of this book. The central topic in Q-learning ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781788834247Supplemental Content