Reinforcement Learning, second edition: An Introduction (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series) - Hardcover

Sutton, Richard S.; Barto, Andrew G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262039249 ISBN 13: 9780262039246

Publisher: Bradford Books, 2018

Synopsis

The significantly expanded and updated new edition of a widely used text on reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence.

Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives while interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the field's key ideas and algorithms. This second edition has been significantly expanded and updated, presenting new topics and updating coverage of other topics.

Like the first edition, this second edition focuses on core online learning algorithms, with the more mathematical material set off in shaded boxes. Part I covers as much of reinforcement learning as possible without going beyond the tabular case for which exact solutions can be found. Many algorithms presented in this part are new to the second edition, including UCB, Expected Sarsa, and Double Learning. Part II extends these ideas to function approximation, with new sections on such topics as artificial neural networks and the Fourier basis, and offers expanded treatment of off-policy learning and policy-gradient methods. Part III has new chapters on reinforcement learning's relationships to psychology and neuroscience, as well as an updated case-studies chapter including AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero, Atari game playing, and IBM Watson's wagering strategy. The final chapter discusses the future societal impacts of reinforcement learning.

About this title

About the Author

Richard S. Sutton is Professor of Computing Science and AITF Chair in Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Alberta, and also Distinguished Research Scientist at DeepMind.

Andrew G. Barto is Professor Emeritus in the College of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Review

“The second edition of Reinforcement Learning by Sutton and Barto comes at just the right time. The appetite for reinforcement learning among machine learning researchers has never been stronger, as the field has been moving tremendously in the last twenty years. If you want to fully understand the fundamentals of learning agents, this is the textbook to go to and get started with. It has been extended with modern developments in deep reinforcement learning while extending the scholarly history of the field to modern days. I will certainly recommend it to all my students and the many other graduate students and researchers who want to get the appropriate context behind the current excitement for RL.”

―Yoshua Bengio, Professor of Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal

Edition details

• Publisher: Bradford Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0262039249
• ISBN 13: 9780262039246
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 552