Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning
Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning

Author: Csaba Grossi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 89

ISBN-13: 3031015517

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Reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize a numerical performance measure that expresses a long-term objective. What distinguishes reinforcement learning from supervised learning is that only partial feedback is given to the learner about the learner's predictions. Further, the predictions may have long term effects through influencing the future state of the controlled system. Thus, time plays a special role. The goal in reinforcement learning is to develop efficient learning algorithms, as well as to understand the algorithms' merits and limitations. Reinforcement learning is of great interest because of the large number of practical applications that it can be used to address, ranging from problems in artificial intelligence to operations research or control engineering. In this book, we focus on those algorithms of reinforcement learning that build on the powerful theory of dynamic programming. We give a fairly comprehensive catalog of learning problems, describe the core ideas, note a large number of state of the art algorithms, followed by the discussion of their theoretical properties and limitations. Table of Contents: Markov Decision Processes / Value Prediction Problems / Control / For Further Exploration

Reinforcement Learning, second edition
Reinforcement Learning, second edition

Author: Richard S. Sutton

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 0262352702

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The significantly expanded and updated new edition of a widely used text on reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives while interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the field's key ideas and algorithms. This second edition has been significantly expanded and updated, presenting new topics and updating coverage of other topics. Like the first edition, this second edition focuses on core online learning algorithms, with the more mathematical material set off in shaded boxes. Part I covers as much of reinforcement learning as possible without going beyond the tabular case for which exact solutions can be found. Many algorithms presented in this part are new to the second edition, including UCB, Expected Sarsa, and Double Learning. Part II extends these ideas to function approximation, with new sections on such topics as artificial neural networks and the Fourier basis, and offers expanded treatment of off-policy learning and policy-gradient methods. Part III has new chapters on reinforcement learning's relationships to psychology and neuroscience, as well as an updated case-studies chapter including AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero, Atari game playing, and IBM Watson's wagering strategy. The final chapter discusses the future societal impacts of reinforcement learning.

Optimization in Large Scale Problems
Optimization in Large Scale Problems

Author: Mahdi Fathi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-20

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 3030285650

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This volume provides resourceful thinking and insightful management solutions to the many challenges that decision makers face in their predictions, preparations, and implementations of the key elements that our societies and industries need to take as they move toward digitalization and smartness. The discussions within the book aim to uncover the sources of large-scale problems in socio-industrial dilemmas, and the theories that can support these challenges. How theories might also transition to real applications is another question that this book aims to uncover. In answer to the viewpoints expressed by several practitioners and academicians, this book aims to provide both a learning platform which spotlights open questions with related case studies. The relationship between Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0 provides the basis for the expert contributions in this book, highlighting the uses of analytical methods such as mathematical optimization, heuristic methods, decomposition methods, stochastic optimization, and more. The book will prove useful to researchers, students, and engineers in different domains who encounter large scale optimization problems and will encourage them to undertake research in this timely and practical field. The book splits into two parts. The first part covers a general perspective and challenges in a smart society and in industry. The second part covers several case studies and solutions from the operations research perspective for large scale challenges specific to various industry and society related phenomena.

Sequential Decision-Making in Musical Intelligence
Sequential Decision-Making in Musical Intelligence

Author: Elad Liebman

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 3030305198

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Over the past 60 years, artificial intelligence has grown from an academic field of research to a ubiquitous array of tools used in everyday technology. Despite its many recent successes, certain meaningful facets of computational intelligence have yet to be thoroughly explored, such as a wide array of complex mental tasks that humans carry out easily, yet are difficult for computers to mimic. A prime example of a domain in which human intelligence thrives, but machine understanding is still fairly limited, is music. Over recent decades, many researchers have used computational tools to perform tasks like genre identification, music summarization, music database querying, and melodic segmentation. While these are all useful algorithmic solutions, we are still a long way from constructing complete music agents able to mimic (at least partially) the complexity with which humans approach music. One key aspect that hasn't been sufficiently studied is that of sequential decision-making in musical intelligence. Addressing this gap, the book focuses on two aspects of musical intelligence: music recommendation and multi-agent interaction in the context of music. Though motivated primarily by music-related tasks, and focusing largely on people's musical preferences, the work presented in this book also establishes that insights from music-specific case studies can also be applicable in other concrete social domains, such as content recommendation.Showing the generality of insights from musical data in other contexts provides evidence for the utility of music domains as testbeds for the development of general artificial intelligence techniques.Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the overall value of taking a sequential decision-making approach in settings previously unexplored from this perspective.

From Bandits to Monte-Carlo Tree Search
From Bandits to Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Author: Rmi Munos

Publisher: Now Pub

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 9781601987662

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Covers the optimism in the face of uncertainty principle applied to large scale optimization problems under finite numerical budget. The initial motivation for this research originated from the empirical success of the Monte-Carlo Tree Search method popularized in Computer Go and further extended to other games, optimization, and planning problems.

Deep Reinforcement Learning
Deep Reinforcement Learning

Author: Hao Dong

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-06-29

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 9811540950

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Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning. It has been able to solve a wide range of complex decision-making tasks that were previously out of reach for a machine, and famously contributed to the success of AlphaGo. Furthermore, it opens up numerous new applications in domains such as healthcare, robotics, smart grids and finance. Divided into three main parts, this book provides a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to DRL. The first part introduces the foundations of deep learning, reinforcement learning (RL) and widely used deep RL methods and discusses their implementation. The second part covers selected DRL research topics, which are useful for those wanting to specialize in DRL research. To help readers gain a deep understanding of DRL and quickly apply the techniques in practice, the third part presents mass applications, such as the intelligent transportation system and learning to run, with detailed explanations. The book is intended for computer science students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, who would like to learn DRL from scratch, practice its implementation, and explore the research topics. It also appeals to engineers and practitioners who do not have strong machine learning background, but want to quickly understand how DRL works and use the techniques in their applications.

Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Programming Using Function Approximators
Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Programming Using Function Approximators

Author: Lucian Busoniu

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1439821097

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From household appliances to applications in robotics, engineered systems involving complex dynamics can only be as effective as the algorithms that control them. While Dynamic Programming (DP) has provided researchers with a way to optimally solve decision and control problems involving complex dynamic systems, its practical value was limited by algorithms that lacked the capacity to scale up to realistic problems. However, in recent years, dramatic developments in Reinforcement Learning (RL), the model-free counterpart of DP, changed our understanding of what is possible. Those developments led to the creation of reliable methods that can be applied even when a mathematical model of the system is unavailable, allowing researchers to solve challenging control problems in engineering, as well as in a variety of other disciplines, including economics, medicine, and artificial intelligence. Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Programming Using Function Approximators provides a comprehensive and unparalleled exploration of the field of RL and DP. With a focus on continuous-variable problems, this seminal text details essential developments that have substantially altered the field over the past decade. In its pages, pioneering experts provide a concise introduction to classical RL and DP, followed by an extensive presentation of the state-of-the-art and novel methods in RL and DP with approximation. Combining algorithm development with theoretical guarantees, they elaborate on their work with illustrative examples and insightful comparisons. Three individual chapters are dedicated to representative algorithms from each of the major classes of techniques: value iteration, policy iteration, and policy search. The features and performance of these algorithms are highlighted in extensive experimental studies on a range of control applications. The recent development of applications involving complex systems has led to a surge of interest in RL and DP methods and the subsequent need for a quality resource on the subject. For graduate students and others new to the field, this book offers a thorough introduction to both the basics and emerging methods. And for those researchers and practitioners working in the fields of optimal and adaptive control, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and operations research, this resource offers a combination of practical algorithms, theoretical analysis, and comprehensive examples that they will be able to adapt and apply to their own work. Access the authors' website at www.dcsc.tudelft.nl/rlbook/ for additional material, including computer code used in the studies and information concerning new developments.

Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Decision Making Under Uncertainty

Author: Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2015-07-24

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0262331713

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An introduction to decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective, covering both theory and applications ranging from speech recognition to airborne collision avoidance. Many important problems involve decision making under uncertainty—that is, choosing actions based on often imperfect observations, with unknown outcomes. Designers of automated decision support systems must take into account the various sources of uncertainty while balancing the multiple objectives of the system. This book provides an introduction to the challenges of decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective. It presents both the theory behind decision making models and algorithms and a collection of example applications that range from speech recognition to aircraft collision avoidance. Focusing on two methods for designing decision agents, planning and reinforcement learning, the book covers probabilistic models, introducing Bayesian networks as a graphical model that captures probabilistic relationships between variables; utility theory as a framework for understanding optimal decision making under uncertainty; Markov decision processes as a method for modeling sequential problems; model uncertainty; state uncertainty; and cooperative decision making involving multiple interacting agents. A series of applications shows how the theoretical concepts can be applied to systems for attribute-based person search, speech applications, collision avoidance, and unmanned aircraft persistent surveillance. Decision Making Under Uncertainty unifies research from different communities using consistent notation, and is accessible to students and researchers across engineering disciplines who have some prior exposure to probability theory and calculus. It can be used as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in fields including computer science, aerospace and electrical engineering, and management science. It will also be a valuable professional reference for researchers in a variety of disciplines.

Neural Approximations for Optimal Control and Decision
Neural Approximations for Optimal Control and Decision

Author: Riccardo Zoppoli

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-12-17

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 3030296938

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Neural Approximations for Optimal Control and Decision provides a comprehensive methodology for the approximate solution of functional optimization problems using neural networks and other nonlinear approximators where the use of traditional optimal control tools is prohibited by complicating factors like non-Gaussian noise, strong nonlinearities, large dimension of state and control vectors, etc. Features of the text include: • a general functional optimization framework; • thorough illustration of recent theoretical insights into the approximate solutions of complex functional optimization problems; • comparison of classical and neural-network based methods of approximate solution; • bounds to the errors of approximate solutions; • solution algorithms for optimal control and decision in deterministic or stochastic environments with perfect or imperfect state measurements over a finite or infinite time horizon and with one decision maker or several; • applications of current interest: routing in communications networks, traffic control, water resource management, etc.; and • numerous, numerically detailed examples. The authors’ diverse backgrounds in systems and control theory, approximation theory, machine learning, and operations research lend the book a range of expertise and subject matter appealing to academics and graduate students in any of those disciplines together with computer science and other areas of engineering.

Dynamic Switching State Systems for Visual Tracking
Dynamic Switching State Systems for Visual Tracking

Author: Becker, Stefan

Publisher: KIT Scientific Publishing

Published: 2020-12-02

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 3731510383

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This work addresses the problem of how to capture the dynamics of maneuvering objects for visual tracking. Towards this end, the perspective of recursive Bayesian filters and the perspective of deep learning approaches for state estimation are considered and their functional viewpoints are brought together.