Distributional Reinforcement Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning) - Hardcover

Bellemare, Marc G.; Dabney, Will; Rowland, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262048019 ISBN 13: 9780262048019

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2023

Synopsis

The first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, providing a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions from a probabilistic perspective.

Distributional reinforcement learning is a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions. Going beyond the common approach to reinforcement learning and expected values, it focuses on the total reward or return obtained as a consequence of an agent's choices—specifically, how this return behaves from a probabilistic perspective. In this first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney, and Mark Rowland, who spearheaded development of the field, present its key concepts and review some of its many applications. They demonstrate its power to account for many complex, interesting phenomena that arise from interactions with one's environment.

The authors present core ideas from classical reinforcement learning to contextualize distributional topics and include mathematical proofs pertaining to major results discussed in the text. They guide the reader through a series of algorithmic and mathematical developments that, in turn, characterize, compute, estimate, and make decisions on the basis of the random return. Practitioners in disciplines as diverse as finance (risk management), computational neuroscience, computational psychiatry, psychology, macroeconomics, and robotics are already using distributional reinforcement learning, paving the way for its expanding applications in mathematical finance, engineering, and the life sciences. More than a mathematical approach, distributional reinforcement learning represents a new perspective on how intelligent agents make predictions and decisions.

About this title

About the Author

Marc G. Bellemare is Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Research and Adjunct Professor, McGill University. Will Dabney is Senior Staff Research Scientist, DeepMind. Mark Rowland is Senior Research Scientist, DeepMind.

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262048019
• ISBN 13: 9780262048019
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384