Course Outline
1. Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Defining Reinforcement Learning
- Distinguishing between Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning
- DRL applications in 2025 (robotics, healthcare, finance, logistics)
- Grasping the agent-environment interaction loop
2. Reinforcement Learning Basics
- Markov Decision Processes (MDP)
- States, Actions, Rewards, Policies, and Value functions
- Balancing Exploration and 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
- Epsilon-greedy exploration and decay strategies
- Setting up RL environments with OpenAI Gymnasium
4. Moving into Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Constraints of tabular methods
- Utilizing neural networks for function approximation
- Deep Q-Network (DQN) structure and workflow
- Experience replay and target networks
5. Advanced 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. Handling Continuous Action Spaces
- Challenges in continuous control
- Application of 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 balancing penalties
- Creating custom environments in Gymnasium
9. Partially Observable Environments and Generalization
- Memory-based techniques using LSTMs and RNNs
- Enhancing agent robustness and generalization
10. Game Theory and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
- Overview of multi-agent environments
- Cooperation versus competition
- Use cases 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
12. Troubleshooting and Optimization
- Identifying unstable training issues
- Addressing reward sparsity and overfitting
- Scaling DRL models on GPUs and distributed systems
13. Summary and Next Steps
- Review of DRL architecture and core algorithms
- Industry trends and research paths (e.g., RLHF, hybrid models)
- Additional resources and reading materials
Requirements
- Strong proficiency in Python programming
- Solid understanding of Calculus and Linear Algebra
- Foundational knowledge of Probability and Statistics
- Practical experience in building machine learning models using Python, along with libraries like NumPy or frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch
Target Audience
- Developers with an interest in AI and intelligent systems
- Data Scientists investigating reinforcement learning frameworks
- Machine Learning Engineers focusing 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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