REINFORCEMENT LEARNING AND STOCHASTIC OPTIMIZATION Clearing the jungle of stochastic optimization Sequential decision problems, which consist of “decision, information, decision, information,” are ubiquitous, spanning virtually every human activity ranging from business applications, health (personal and public health, and medical decision making), energy, the sciences, all fields of engineering, finance, and e-commerce. The diversity of applications attracted the attention of at least 15 distinct fields of research, using eight distinct notational systems which produced a vast array of analytical tools. A byproduct is that powerful tools developed in one community may be unknown to other communities. Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization offers a single canonical framework that can model any sequential decision problem using five core components: state variables, decision variables, exogenous information variables, transition function, and objective function. This book highlights twelve types of uncertainty that might enter any model and pulls together the diverse set of methods for making decisions, known as policies, into four fundamental classes that span every method suggested in the academic literature or used in practice. Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization is the first book to provide a balanced treatment of the different methods for modeling and solving sequential decision problems, following the style used by most books on machine learning, optimization, and simulation. The presentation is designed for readers with a course in probability and statistics, and an interest in modeling and applications. Linear programming is occasionally used for specific problem classes. The book is designed for readers who are new to the field, as well as those with some background in optimization under uncertainty. Throughout this book, readers will find references to over 100 different applications, spanning pure learning problems, dynamic resource allocation problems, general state-dependent problems, and hybrid learning/resource allocation problems such as those that arose in the COVID pandemic. There are 370 exercises, organized into seven groups, ranging from review questions, modeling, computation, problem solving, theory, programming exercises and a “diary problem” that a reader chooses at the beginning of the book, and which is used as a basis for questions throughout the rest of the book.

Have you ever wondered how AlphaZero learns to defeat the top human Go players? Do you have any clues about how an autonomous driving system can gradually develop self-driving skills beyond normal drivers? What is the key that enables AlphaStar to make decisions in Starcraft, a notoriously difficult strategy game that has partial information and complex rules? The core mechanism underlying those recent technical breakthroughs is reinforcement learning (RL), a theory that can help an agent to develop the self-evolution ability through continuing environment interactions. In the past few years, the AI community has witnessed phenomenal success of reinforcement learning in various fields, including chess games, computer games and robotic control. RL is also considered to be a promising and powerful tool to create general artificial intelligence in the future. As an interdisciplinary field of trial-and-error learning and optimal control, RL resembles how humans reinforce their intelligence by interacting with the environment and provides a principled solution for sequential decision making and optimal control in large-scale and complex problems. Since RL contains a wide range of new concepts and theories, scholars may be plagued by a number of questions: What is the inherent mechanism of reinforcement learning? What is the internal connection between RL and optimal control? How has RL evolved in the past few decades, and what are the milestones? How do we choose and implement practical and effective RL algorithms for real-world scenarios? What are the key challenges that RL faces today, and how can we solve them? What is the current trend of RL research? You can find answers to all those questions in this book. The purpose of the book is to help researchers and practitioners take a comprehensive view of RL and understand the in-depth connection between RL and optimal control. The book includes not only systematic and thorough explanations of theoretical basics but also methodical guidance of practical algorithm implementations. The book intends to provide a comprehensive coverage of both classic theories and recent achievements, and the content is carefully and logically organized, including basic topics such as the main concepts and terminologies of RL, Markov decision process (MDP), Bellman’s optimality condition, Monte Carlo learning, temporal difference learning, stochastic dynamic programming, function approximation, policy gradient methods, approximate dynamic programming, and deep RL, as well as the latest advances in action and state constraints, safety guarantee, reference harmonization, robust RL, partially observable MDP, multiagent RL, inverse RL, offline RL, and so on.

Have you ever wondered how AlphaZero learns to defeat the top human Go players? Do you have any clues about how an autonomous driving system can gradually develop self-driving skills beyond normal drivers? What is the key that enables AlphaStar to make decisions in Starcraft, a notoriously difficult strategy game that has partial information and complex rules? The core mechanism underlying those recent technical breakthroughs is reinforcement learning (RL), a theory that can help an agent to develop the self-evolution ability through continuing environment interactions. In the past few years, the AI community has witnessed phenomenal success of reinforcement learning in various fields, including chess games, computer games and robotic control. RL is also considered to be a promising and powerful tool to create general artificial intelligence in the future. As an interdisciplinary field of trial-and-error learning and optimal control, RL resembles how humans reinforce their intelligence by interacting with the environment and provides a principled solution for sequential decision making and optimal control in large-scale and complex problems. Since RL contains a wide range of new concepts and theories, scholars may be plagued by a number of questions: What is the inherent mechanism of reinforcement learning? What is the internal connection between RL and optimal control? How has RL evolved in the past few decades, and what are the milestones? How do we choose and implement practical and effective RL algorithms for real-world scenarios? What are the key challenges that RL faces today, and how can we solve them? What is the current trend of RL research? You can find answers to all those questions in this book. The purpose of the book is to help researchers and practitioners take a comprehensive view of RL and understand the in-depth connection between RL and optimal control. The book includes not only systematic and thorough explanations of theoretical basics but also methodical guidance of practical algorithm implementations. The book intends to provide a comprehensive coverage of both classic theories and recent achievements, and the content is carefully and logically organized, including basic topics such as the main concepts and terminologies of RL, Markov decision process (MDP), Bellman's optimality condition, Monte Carlo learning, temporal difference learning, stochastic dynamic programming, function approximation, policy gradient methods, approximate dynamic programming, and deep RL, as well as the latest advances in action and state constraints, safety guarantee, reference harmonization, robust RL, partially observable MDP, multiagent RL, inverse RL, offline RL, and so on.

This handbook presents state-of-the-art research in reinforcement learning, focusing on its applications in the control and game theory of dynamic systems and future directions for related research and technology. The contributions gathered in this book deal with challenges faced when using learning and adaptation methods to solve academic and industrial problems, such as optimization in dynamic environments with single and multiple agents, convergence and performance analysis, and online implementation. They explore means by which these difficulties can be solved, and cover a wide range of related topics including: deep learning; artificial intelligence; applications of game theory; mixed modality learning; and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Practicing engineers and scholars in the field of machine learning, game theory, and autonomous control will find the Handbook of Reinforcement Learning and Control to be thought-provoking, instructive and informative.

The purpose of this book is to develop in greater depth some of the methods from the author's Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control recently published textbook (Athena Scientific, 2019). In particular, we present new research, relating to systems involving multiple agents, partitioned architectures, and distributed asynchronous computation. We pay special attention to the contexts of dynamic programming/policy iteration and control theory/model predictive control. We also discuss in some detail the application of the methodology to challenging discrete/combinatorial optimization problems, such as routing, scheduling, assignment, and mixed integer programming, including the use of neural network approximations within these contexts. The book focuses on the fundamental idea of policy iteration, i.e., start from some policy, and successively generate one or more improved policies. If just one improved policy is generated, this is called rollout, which, based on broad and consistent computational experience, appears to be one of the most versatile and reliable of all reinforcement learning methods. In this book, rollout algorithms are developed for both discrete deterministic and stochastic DP problems, and the development of distributed implementations in both multiagent and multiprocessor settings, aiming to take advantage of parallelism. Approximate policy iteration is more ambitious than rollout, but it is a strictly off-line method, and it is generally far more computationally intensive. This motivates the use of parallel and distributed computation. One of the purposes of the monograph is to discuss distributed (possibly asynchronous) methods that relate to rollout and policy iteration, both in the context of an exact and an approximate implementation involving neural networks or other approximation architectures. Much of the new research is inspired by the remarkable AlphaZero chess program, where policy iteration, value and policy networks, approximate lookahead minimization, and parallel computation all play an important role.

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.

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 encompasses both a science of adaptive behavior of rational beings in uncertain environments and a computational methodology for finding optimal behaviors for challenging problems in control, optimization and adaptive behavior of intelligent agents. As a field, reinforcement learning has progressed tremendously in the past decade. The main goal of this book is to present an up-to-date series of survey articles on the main contemporary sub-fields of reinforcement learning. This includes surveys on partially observable environments, hierarchical task decompositions, relational knowledge representation and predictive state representations. Furthermore, topics such as transfer, evolutionary methods and continuous spaces in reinforcement learning are surveyed. In addition, several chapters review reinforcement learning methods in robotics, in games, and in computational neuroscience. In total seventeen different subfields are presented by mostly young experts in those areas, and together they truly represent a state-of-the-art of current reinforcement learning research. Marco Wiering works at the artificial intelligence department of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has published extensively on various reinforcement learning topics. Martijn van Otterlo works in the cognitive artificial intelligence group at the Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands. He has mainly focused on expressive knowledge representation in reinforcement learning settings.

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.