Scribd
Upload
6 views

Reinforcement Learning

Uploaded by

Palla Srija
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
6 views

Reinforcement Learning

Uploaded by

Palla Srija
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a subset of machine learning where an agent learns to make
decisions by interacting with an environment to maximize a reward signal. Unlike supervised
learning, where the model learns from labelled examples, RL focuses on learning from the
consequences of actions and exploring an environment to discover optimal behaviours.

Key Components of Reinforcement Learning

1. Agent: The learner or decision-maker.


2. Environment: Everything the agent interacts with.
3. State (S): A representation of the current situation the agent is in.
4. Action (A): A set of all possible moves the agent can make.
5. Reward (R): Feedback from the environment, used to evaluate the success of an
action.
6. Policy (π): A strategy that defines the actions the agent takes based on its current
state.
7. Value Function (V): Estimates the long-term rewards that can be achieved from a
given state.
8. Q-Function (Q): Evaluates the expected utility of taking a specific action in a
specific state.

How RL Works

The agent interacts with the environment in discrete time steps:

1. Observe the current state (St).


2. Take an action (At) based on the policy.
3. Receive a reward (Rt) and observe the new state (St+1).
4. Update the policy to improve decision-making.

Types of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

1. Model-Free RL:
o Focuses on learning directly from the interaction without modeling the
environment.
o Examples:
 Q-Learning (off-policy)
 SARSA (on-policy)
2. Model-Based RL:
o Attempts to build a model of the environment for planning.
3. Policy Gradient Methods:
o Directly optimize the policy using gradient ascent.
o Examples:
 REINFORCE
 Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)
4. Deep Reinforcement Learning:
o Combines RL with deep neural networks to handle high-dimensional state and
action spaces.
o Examples:
 Deep Q-Networks (DQN)
 Actor-Critic methods (A3C, DDPG)

Applications of RL

1. Robotics: Training robots to perform tasks like walking, grasping, and assembling.
2. Game Playing: Achieving superhuman performance in games like Go, Chess, and
StarCraft (e.g., AlphaGo, AlphaStar).
3. Autonomous Vehicles: Learning to navigate and make driving decisions.
4. Healthcare: Personalized treatment planning and drug discovery.
5. Finance: Portfolio management and algorithmic trading.

Challenges in Reinforcement Learning

1. Exploration vs. Exploitation: Balancing trying new actions (exploration) and using
known strategies (exploitation).
2. Sparse Rewards: Rewards might be infrequent, making learning difficult.
3. Computational Complexity: Requires significant computational resources,
especially for deep RL.
4. Stability: Training RL models can be unstable and sensitive to hyperparameters.

You might also like