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 (3)
I really liked the end where we took the time to play around with CHAT GPT. The room was not set up the best for this- instead of one large table a couple of small ones so we could get into small groups and brainstorm would have helped
Nola - Laramie County Community College
Course - Artificial Intelligence (AI) Overview
Working from first principles in a focused way, and moving to applying case studies within the same day
Maggie Webb - Department of Jobs, Regions, and Precincts
Course - Artificial Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Thinking
That it was applying real company data. Trainer had a very good approach by making trainees participate and compete