from Part III - Probabilistic Models
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 May 2025
Learning to act with probabilistic models is the area of reinforcement learning (RL), the topic of this chapter. RL in some ways parallels the adaptation mechanisms of natural beings to their environment, relying on feedback mechanisms and extending the homeostasis regulations to complex behaviors. With continual learning, an actor can cope with a continually changing environment.This chapter first introduces the main principles of reinforcement learning. It presents a simple Q-learning RL algorithm. It shows how to generalize a learned relation with a parametric representation. it introduces neural network methods, which play a major in learning and are needed for deep RL (Section 10.5) and policy-based RL (Section 10.6). The issues of aided reinforcement learning with shaped rewards, imitation learning, and inverse reinforcement learning are addressed next. Section 10.8 is about probabilistic planning and RL.
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