Course Outline
1. Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Defining Reinforcement Learning
- Distinguishing Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning
- DRL applications in 2025 (robotics, healthcare, finance, logistics)
- Analyzing the agent-environment interaction loop
2. Reinforcement Learning Fundamentals
- Markov Decision Processes (MDP)
- Concepts of State, Action, Reward, Policy, and Value functions
- Balancing Exploration vs. Exploitation
- Monte Carlo methods and Temporal-Difference (TD) learning
3. Implementing Basic RL Algorithms
- Tabular approaches: Dynamic Programming, Policy Evaluation, and Iteration
- Q-Learning and SARSA mechanisms
- Epsilon-greedy exploration and decay strategies
- Creating RL environments with OpenAI Gymnasium
4. Transition to Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Limitations associated with tabular methods
- Leveraging neural networks for function approximation
- Deep Q-Network (DQN) architecture and operational workflow
- Experience replay and target network usage
5. Advanced DRL Algorithms
- Double DQN, Dueling DQN, and Prioritized Experience Replay
- Policy Gradient Methods: The REINFORCE algorithm
- Actor-Critic architectures (A2C, A3C)
- Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)
- Soft Actor-Critic (SAC)
6. Working with Continuous Action Spaces
- Challenges inherent in continuous control
- Applying DDPG (Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient)
- Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3)
7. Practical Tools and Frameworks
- Utilizing Stable-Baselines3 and Ray RLlib
- Logging and monitoring via TensorBoard
- Hyperparameter tuning for DRL models
8. Reward Engineering and Environment Design
- Reward shaping and penalty balancing techniques
- Sim-to-real transfer learning principles
- Developing custom environments in Gymnasium
9. Partially Observable Environments and Generalization
- Managing incomplete state information (POMDPs)
- Memory-based strategies using LSTMs and RNNs
- Enhancing agent robustness and generalization capabilities
10. Game Theory and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
- Overview of multi-agent environments
- Dynamics of Cooperation vs. competition
- Use cases in adversarial training and strategy refinement
11. Case Studies and Real-World Applications
- Simulating autonomous driving scenarios
- Dynamic pricing and financial trading tactics
- Robotics and industrial automation processes
12. Troubleshooting and Optimization
- Identifying and resolving unstable training issues
- Addressing reward sparsity and overfitting
- Scaling DRL models across GPUs and distributed systems
13. Summary and Next Steps
- Review of DRL architecture and essential algorithms
- Current industry trends and research paths (e.g., RLHF, hybrid models)
- Recommended further resources and reading materials
Requirements
- Strong proficiency in Python programming
- Solid understanding of Calculus and Linear Algebra
- Foundational knowledge of Probability and Statistics
- Experience developing machine learning models with Python, NumPy, or TensorFlow/PyTorch
Target Audience
- Developers focused on AI and intelligent system development
- Data Scientists investigating reinforcement learning frameworks
- Machine Learning Engineers specialized in autonomous systems
Testimonials (2)
Getting people that never used AI some repetition in prompting and people that do use AI to consider different methods to using it.
Matthew Gay - Tarsus Pharmaceuticals
Course - Artificial Intelligence (AI) Overview
Working from first principles in a focused way, and moving to applying case studies within the same day