This book constitutes revised and selected papers of the 8th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning, EWRL 2008, which took place in Villeneuve d'Ascq, France, during June 30 - July 3, 2008. The 21 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. They are dedicated to the field of and current researches in reinforcement learning.

Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning addresses current research in an exciting area that is gaining a great deal of popularity in the Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network communities. Reinforcement learning has become a primary paradigm of machine learning. It applies to problems in which an agent (such as a robot, a process controller, or an information-retrieval engine) has to learn how to behave given only information about the success of its current actions. This book is a collection of important papers that address topics including the theoretical foundations of dynamic programming approaches, the role of prior knowledge, and methods for improving performance of reinforcement-learning techniques. These papers build on previous work and will form an important resource for students and researchers in the area. Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising twelve invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Machine Learning (Volume 22, Numbers 1, 2 and 3).

Explore reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to build cutting-edge games using Python libraries such as PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, and TensorFlow Key FeaturesGet to grips with the different reinforcement and DRL algorithms for game developmentLearn how to implement components such as artificial agents, map and level generation, and audio generationGain insights into cutting-edge RL research and understand how it is similar to artificial general researchBook Description With the increased presence of AI in the gaming industry, developers are challenged to create highly responsive and adaptive games by integrating artificial intelligence into their projects. This book is your guide to learning how various reinforcement learning techniques and algorithms play an important role in game development with Python. Starting with the basics, this book will help you build a strong foundation in reinforcement learning for game development. Each chapter will assist you in implementing different reinforcement learning techniques, such as Markov decision processes (MDPs), Q-learning, actor-critic methods, SARSA, and deterministic policy gradient algorithms, to build logical self-learning agents. Learning these techniques will enhance your game development skills and add a variety of features to improve your game agent’s productivity. As you advance, you’ll understand how deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques can be used to devise strategies to help agents learn from their actions and build engaging games. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to apply reinforcement learning techniques to build a variety of projects and contribute to open source applications. What you will learnUnderstand how deep learning can be integrated into an RL agentExplore basic to advanced algorithms commonly used in game developmentBuild agents that can learn and solve problems in all types of environmentsTrain a Deep Q-Network (DQN) agent to solve the CartPole balancing problemDevelop game AI agents by understanding the mechanism behind complex AIIntegrate all the concepts learned into new projects or gaming agentsWho this book is for If you’re a game developer looking to implement AI techniques to build next-generation games from scratch, this book is for you. Machine learning and deep learning practitioners, and RL researchers who want to understand how to use self-learning agents in the game domain will also find this book useful. Knowledge of game development and Python programming experience are required.

The purpose of this book is to provide an up-to-date and systematical introduction to the principles and algorithms of machine learning. The definition of learning is broad enough to include most tasks that we commonly call “learning” tasks, as we use the word in daily life. It is also broad enough to encompass computers that improve from experience in quite straightforward ways. The book will be of interest to industrial engineers and scientists as well as academics who wish to pursue machine learning. The book is intended for both graduate and postgraduate students in fields such as computer science, cybernetics, system sciences, engineering, statistics, and social sciences, and as a reference for software professionals and practitioners. The wide scope of the book provides a good introduction to many approaches of machine learning, and it is also the source of useful bibliographical information.

This book collects recent theoretical advances and concrete applications of learning automata (LAs) in various areas of computer science, presenting a broad treatment of the computer science field in a survey style. Learning automata (LAs) have proven to be effective decision-making agents, especially within unknown stochastic environments. The book starts with a brief explanation of LAs and their baseline variations. It subsequently introduces readers to a number of recently developed, complex structures used to supplement LAs, and describes their steady-state behaviors. These complex structures have been developed because, by design, LAs are simple units used to perform simple tasks; their full potential can only be tapped when several interconnected LAs cooperate to produce a group synergy. In turn, the next part of the book highlights a range of LA-based applications in diverse computer science domains, from wireless sensor networks, to peer-to-peer networks, to complex social networks, and finally to Petri nets. The book accompanies the reader on a comprehensive journey, starting from basic concepts, continuing to recent theoretical findings, and ending in the applications of LAs in problems from numerous research domains. As such, the book offers a valuable resource for all computer engineers, scientists, and students, especially those whose work involves the reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence domains.

This book constitutes revised and selected papers of the 9th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning, EWRL 2011, which took place in Athens, Greece in September 2011. The papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections online reinforcement learning, learning and exploring MDPs, function approximation methods for reinforcement learning, macro-actions in reinforcement learning, policy search and bounds, multi-task and transfer reinforcement learning, multi-agent reinforcement learning, apprenticeship and inverse reinforcement learning and real-world reinforcement learning.

Recent Advances in Robot Learning contains seven papers on robot learning written by leading researchers in the field. As the selection of papers illustrates, the field of robot learning is both active and diverse. A variety of machine learning methods, ranging from inductive logic programming to reinforcement learning, is being applied to many subproblems in robot perception and control, often with objectives as diverse as parameter calibration and concept formulation. While no unified robot learning framework has yet emerged to cover the variety of problems and approaches described in these papers and other publications, a clear set of shared issues underlies many robot learning problems. Machine learning, when applied to robotics, is situated: it is embedded into a real-world system that tightly integrates perception, decision making and execution. Since robot learning involves decision making, there is an inherent active learning issue. Robotic domains are usually complex, yet the expense of using actual robotic hardware often prohibits the collection of large amounts of training data. Most robotic systems are real-time systems. Decisions must be made within critical or practical time constraints. These characteristics present challenges and constraints to the learning system. Since these characteristics are shared by other important real-world application domains, robotics is a highly attractive area for research on machine learning. On the other hand, machine learning is also highly attractive to robotics. There is a great variety of open problems in robotics that defy a static, hand-coded solution. Recent Advances in Robot Learning is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising seven invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Machine Learning (Volume 23, Numbers 2 and 3).

Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning addresses current research in an exciting area that is gaining a great deal of popularity in the Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network communities. Reinforcement learning has become a primary paradigm of machine learning. It applies to problems in which an agent (such as a robot, a process controller, or an information-retrieval engine) has to learn how to behave given only information about the success of its current actions. This book is a collection of important papers that address topics including the theoretical foundations of dynamic programming approaches, the role of prior knowledge, and methods for improving performance of reinforcement-learning techniques. These papers build on previous work and will form an important resource for students and researchers in the area. Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising twelve invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Machine Learning (Volume 22, Numbers 1, 2 and 3).

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.

This book starts by presenting the basics of reinforcement learning using highly intuitive and easy-to-understand examples and applications, and then introduces the cutting-edge research advances that make reinforcement learning capable of out-performing most state-of-art systems, and even humans in a number of applications. The book not only equips readers with an understanding of multiple advanced and innovative algorithms, but also prepares them to implement systems such as those created by Google Deep Mind in actual code. This book is intended for readers who want to both understand and apply advanced concepts in a field that combines the best of two worlds – deep learning and reinforcement learning – to tap the potential of ‘advanced artificial intelligence’ for creating real-world applications and game-winning algorithms.