Course Outline
1. Overview of Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Defining Reinforcement Learning
- Distinguishing between Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning
- DRL applications in 2025 (robotics, healthcare, finance, logistics)
- Comprehending the agent-environment interaction cycle
2. Core Principles of Reinforcement Learning
- 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 Fundamental RL Algorithms
- Tabular techniques: Dynamic Programming, Policy Evaluation, and Iteration
- Q-Learning and SARSA algorithms
- Epsilon-greedy exploration and decay strategies
- Creating RL environments with OpenAI Gymnasium
4. Moving Toward Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Constraints of tabular methods
- Employing neural networks for function approximation
- Deep Q-Network (DQN) structure and workflow
- Experience replay and target networks
5. Sophisticated 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. Managing Continuous Action Spaces
- Challenges in continuous control scenarios
- 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
- Concepts in Sim-to-real transfer learning
- Designing 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
- Introduction to multi-agent environments
- Dynamics of Cooperation vs. competition
- Applications in adversarial training and strategy optimization
11. Case Studies and Real-World Applications
- Simulations for autonomous driving
- Dynamic pricing and financial trading strategies
- Robotics and industrial automation solutions
12. Troubleshooting and Optimization
- Identifying unstable training issues
- Addressing reward sparsity and overfitting
- Scaling DRL models across GPUs and distributed systems
13. Recap and Future Directions
- Summary of DRL architecture and core algorithms
- Industry trends and research trajectories (e.g., RLHF, hybrid models)
- Additional resources and recommended reading
Requirements
- Strong proficiency in Python programming
- Solid understanding of Calculus and Linear Algebra
- Foundational knowledge in Probability and Statistics
- Prior experience in developing machine learning models with Python, NumPy, or TensorFlow/PyTorch
Target Audience
- Developers seeking to explore AI and intelligent systems
- Data Scientists investigating reinforcement learning frameworks
- Machine Learning Engineers focused on 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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