Course Outline
1. Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning
- The concept of Reinforcement Learning
- Distinguishing between Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning
- Current applications of DRL in 2025 across robotics, healthcare, finance, and logistics
- The agent-environment interaction loop explained
2. Reinforcement Learning Fundamentals
- Markov Decision Processes (MDP)
- Core concepts: State, Action, Reward, Policy, and Value functions
- The balance between Exploration and Exploitation
- Monte Carlo methods and Temporal-Difference (TD) learning
3. Implementing Basic RL Algorithms
- Tabular techniques: Dynamic Programming, Policy Evaluation, and Iteration
- Q-Learning and SARSA algorithms
- Epsilon-greedy exploration strategies and decay mechanisms
- Creating RL environments using OpenAI Gymnasium
4. Transitioning to Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Constraints of tabular approaches
- Utilizing neural networks for function approximation
- Deep Q-Network (DQN) architecture and workflow
- Experience replay mechanisms and target networks
5. Advanced DRL Algorithms
- Variants like Double DQN, Dueling DQN, and Prioritized Experience Replay
- Policy Gradient Methods, specifically the REINFORCE algorithm
- Actor-Critic architectures, including A2C and A3C
- Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)
- Soft Actor-Critic (SAC)
6. Managing Continuous Action Spaces
- Challenges associated with continuous control
- Applying DDPG (Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient)
- Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3)
7. Practical Tools and Frameworks
- Leveraging Stable-Baselines3 and Ray RLlib
- Logging and monitoring via TensorBoard
- Hyperparameter tuning for DRL models
8. Reward Engineering and Environment Design
- Shaping rewards and balancing penalties
- Concepts of Sim-to-real transfer learning
- 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 versus Competition
- Uses in adversarial training and strategy optimization
11. Case Studies and Real-World Applications
- Simulations for autonomous driving
- Strategies for dynamic pricing and financial trading
- Robotics and industrial automation implementations
12. Troubleshooting and Optimization
- Identifying 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 core algorithms
- Industry trends and research areas (e.g., RLHF, hybrid models)
- Additional resources and recommended reading
Requirements
- Proficiency in Python programming
- A solid understanding of Calculus and Linear Algebra
- Fundamental knowledge of Probability and Statistics
- Practical experience in building machine learning models using Python along with NumPy, TensorFlow, or PyTorch
Target Audience
- Developers with an interest in AI and intelligent systems
- Data Scientists exploring reinforcement learning frameworks
- Machine Learning Engineers specializing 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
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