Course Outline

1. Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning

  • What is Reinforcement Learning?
  • Difference between Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning
  • Applications of DRL in 2025 (robotics, healthcare, finance, logistics)
  • Understanding the agent-environment interaction loop

2. Reinforcement Learning Fundamentals

  • Markov Decision Processes (MDP)
  • State, Action, Reward, Policy, and Value functions
  • Exploration vs. Exploitation trade-off
  • Monte Carlo methods and Temporal-Difference (TD) learning

3. Implementing Basic RL Algorithms

  • Tabular methods: Dynamic Programming, Policy Evaluation, and Iteration
  • Q-Learning and SARSA
  • Epsilon-greedy exploration and decaying strategies
  • Implementing RL environments with OpenAI Gymnasium

4. Transition to Deep Reinforcement Learning

  • Limitations of tabular methods
  • Using neural networks for function approximation
  • Deep Q-Network (DQN) architecture and workflow
  • Experience replay and target networks

5. Advanced DRL Algorithms

  • Double DQN, Dueling DQN, and Prioritized Experience Replay
  • Policy Gradient Methods: REINFORCE algorithm
  • Actor-Critic architectures (A2C, A3C)
  • Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)
  • Soft Actor-Critic (SAC)

6. Working with Continuous Action Spaces

  • Challenges in continuous control
  • Using DDPG (Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient)
  • Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3)

7. Practical Tools and Frameworks

  • Using Stable-Baselines3 and Ray RLlib
  • Logging and monitoring with TensorBoard
  • Hyperparameter tuning for DRL models

8. Reward Engineering and Environment Design

  • Reward shaping and penalty balancing
  • Sim-to-real transfer learning concepts
  • Custom environment creation in Gymnasium

9. Partially Observable Environments and Generalization

  • Handling incomplete state information (POMDPs)
  • Memory-based approaches using LSTMs and RNNs
  • Improving agent robustness and generalization

10. Game Theory and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

  • Introduction to multi-agent environments
  • Cooperation vs. competition
  • Applications in adversarial training and strategy optimization

11. Case Studies and Real-World Applications

  • Autonomous driving simulations
  • Dynamic pricing and financial trading strategies
  • Robotics and industrial automation

12. Troubleshooting and Optimization

  • Diagnosing unstable training
  • Managing reward sparsity and overfitting
  • Scaling DRL models on GPUs and distributed systems

13. Summary and Next Steps

  • Recap of DRL architecture and key algorithms
  • Industry trends and research directions (e.g., RLHF, hybrid models)
  • Further resources and reading materials

Requirements

  • Proficiency in Python programming
  • Understanding of Calculus and Linear Algebra
  • Basic knowledge of Probability and Statistics
  • Experience building machine learning models using Python and NumPy or TensorFlow/PyTorch

Audience

  • Developers interested in AI and intelligent systems
  • Data Scientists exploring reinforcement learning frameworks
  • Machine Learning Engineers working with autonomous systems
 21 Hours

Delivery Options

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  • Training scheduled on a date of your choice
  • Delivered online, onsite/classroom or hybrid by experts sharing real world experience

Private Group Prices RRP from £5700 online delivery, based on a group of 2 delegates, £1800 per additional delegate (excludes any certification / exam costs). We recommend a maximum group size of 12 for most learning events.

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