June 2018
Intermediate to advanced
546 pages
13h 30m
English
In the previous section, we discussed the REINFORCE method, which is a natural extension of cross-entropy from Chapter 4, The Cross-Entropy Method. Unfortunately, both REINFORCE and cross-entropy still suffer from several problems, which make both of them limited to simple environments.
First of all, we still need to wait for the full episode to complete before we can start training. Even worse, both REINFORCE and cross-entropy behave better with more episodes used for training (just from the fact that more episodes mean more training data, which means more accurate PG). This situation is fine for short episodes in the CartPole, when in the beginning, we can barely handle the bar for more than 10 steps, ...