Reinforcement learning (RL) refers to goal-oriented algorithms, in which an "agent" learns to accomplish a specific objective or goal while maximizing a set "reward" over many steps. RL agents are what people often think of when they describe "Artificial Intelligence" as portrayed in movies. The RL agent often starts from a blank slate, and under the right conditions, can achieve amazing performances as it learns about its environment.
The RL algorithms are penalized when they make the wrong decisions and rewarded when they make the right ones, hence the term "reinforcement learning". Setting up the environment, choosing the appropriate algorithm/strategy, and designing a reward function that will provide the incentives to achieve the desired behaviour from the agent – these are all some of the aspects that make Reinforcement Learning both a fascinating and complex field.
Applications of Reinforcement Learning are varied across multiple industries including Robotics, Chatbots, and Self-Driving Cars. Most new students of Reinforcement Learning get introduced to RL by using the OpenAI Gym framework. TDS authors, Jonathas Figueiredo and Vihar Kurama wrote excellent articles on OpenAI and RL using Python to get you started. Once you have grounded your knowledge in RL, then have a look at more complex applications such as Training Agents to Play Tennis or Training a Chatbot using RL.
— Hamza Bendemra, Editorial Associate, Towards Data Science.
Applications of Reinforcement Learning in Real World
By Garychl – 13 min read
While Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are becoming more important for businesses due to their applications in Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a framework for computational neuroscience to model decision making process seems to be undervalued.
OpenAI Gym from scratch
By Jonathas Figueiredo – 10 min read
There are a lot of work and tutorials out there explaining how to use OpenAI Gym toolkit and also how to use Keras and TensorFlow to train existing environments using some existing OpenAI Gym structures. However in this tutorial I will explain how to create an OpenAI environment from scratch and train an agent on it.
Reinforcement Learning with Python
By Vihar Kurama – 11 min read
Reinforcement is a class of machine learning where an agent learns how to behave in the environment by performing actions and thereby drawing intuitions and seeing the results. In this article, you’ll learn to understand and design a reinforcement learning problem and solve in Python.
Training Bots to Play Tennis
By Thomas Tracey – 16 min read
This post explores my work on the final project for Udacity’s Deep Reinforcement Learning Nanodegree. My goal is to help other machine learning (ML) students and professionals who are in the early phases of building their intuition in reinforcement learning (RL).
Learning to Drive Smoothly in Minutes
By Antonin RAFFIN – 11 min read
In this post, we will see how to train an autonomous racing car in minutes and how to smooth its control. The method, based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) and presented here in simulation (Donkey Car simulator), was designed to be applicable in the real world. It builds on the work of a startup named Wayve.ai that focuses on autonomous driving.
Robotic Control with Graph Networks
By Or Rivlin – 9 min read
Machine learning is helping to transform many fields across diverse industries, as anyone interested in technology undoubtedly knows. Things like computer vision and natural language processing were changed dramatically due to deep learning algorithms in the past few years, and the effects of that change are seeping in to our daily lives.
Training a Goal-Oriented Chatbot with Deep Reinforcement Learning (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V)
By Max Brenner – 10 min read
In this series we are going to be learning about goal-oriented chatbots and training one with deep reinforcement learning in python! All from scratch! The code for this tutorial series can be found here.
We also thank all the great new writers who joined us recently, Marcos Treviso, David Comfort, Jean-Christophe B. Loiseau, Moritz Kirschte, Karl Weinmeister, Cameron Bronstein, Aman Deep, Jacob Davis, James Dietle, Zaid Alissa Almaliki, AlainChabrier, Adham Ehab, Fiona Grimm, and many others. We invite you to take a look at their profiles and check out their work.