Marc G. Bellemare

Mark Rowland

Will Dabney

The first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, providing a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions from a probabilistic perspective. Distributional reinforcement learning is a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions. Going beyond the common approach to reinforcement learning and expected values, it focuses on the total reward or return obtained as a consequence of an agent's choices—specifically, how this return behaves from a probabilistic perspective. In this first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney, and Mark Rowland, who spearheaded development of the field, present its key concepts and review some of its many applications. They demonstrate its power to account for many complex, interesting phenomena that arise from interactions with one's environment. The authors present core ideas from classical reinforcement learning to contextualize distributional topics and include mathematical proofs pertaining to major results discussed in the text. They guide the reader through a series of algorithmic and mathematical developments that, in turn, characterize, compute, estimate, and make decisions on the basis of the random return. Practitioners in disciplines as diverse as finance (risk management), computational neuroscience, computational psychiatry, psychology, macroeconomics, and robotics are already using distributional reinforcement learning, paving the way for its expanding applications in mathematical finance, engineering, and the life sciences. More than a mathematical approach, distributional reinforcement learning represents a new perspective on how intelligent agents make predictions and decisions.

Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Riashat Islam

Joelle Pineau

Vincent Francois-Lavet

Peter Henderson

Deep reinforcement learning is the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning. This field of research has recently been able to solve a wide range of complex decision-making tasks that were previously out of reach for a machine. Deep RL opens up many new applications in domains such as healthcare, robotics, smart grids, finance, and many more. This book provides the reader with a starting point for understanding the topic. Although written at a research level it provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to deep reinforcement learning models, algorithms and techniques. Particular focus is on the aspects related to generalization and how deep RL can be used for practical applications. Written by recognized experts, this book is an important introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning for practitioners, researchers and students alike.

Marc G. Bellemare

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