CS 234: Reinforcement Learning

To realize the dreams and impact of AI requires autonomous systems that learn to make good decisions. Reinforcement learning is one powerful paradigm for doing so, and it is relevant to an enormous range of tasks, including robotics, game playing, consumer modeling and healthcare. This class will provide a solid introduction to the field of reinforcement learning and students will learn about the core challenges and approaches, including generalization and exploration. Through a combination of lectures, and written and coding assignments, students will become well versed in key ideas and techniques for RL. Assignments will include the basics of reinforcement learning as well as deep reinforcement learning — an extremely promising new area that combines deep learning techniques with reinforcement learning.

• Proficiency in Python
  All class assignments will be in Python. There is a tutorial here for those who aren't as familiar with Python. If you have a lot of programming experience but in a different language (e.g. C/ C++/ Matlab/ Javascript) you will probably be fine.
• College Calculus, Linear Algebra (e.g. MATH 51, CME 100)
  You should be comfortable taking derivatives and understanding matrix vector operations and notation.
• Basic Probability and Statistics (e.g. CS 109 or other stats course)
  You should know basics of probabilities, Gaussian distributions, mean, standard deviation, etc.
• Foundations of Machine Learning
  We will be formulating cost functions, taking derivatives and performing optimization with gradient descent. Either CS 221 or CS 229 cover this background. Some optimization tricks will be more intuitive with some knowledge of convex optimization.

By the end of the class students should be able to:

• Define the key features of reinforcement learning that distinguishes it from AI and non-interactive machine learning (as assessed by the exam).
• Given an application problem (e.g. from computer vision, robotics, etc), decide if it should be formulated as a RL problem; if yes be able to define it formally (in terms of the state space, action space, dynamics and reward model), state what algorithm (from class) is best suited for addressing it and justify your answer (as assessed by the exam).
• Implement in code common RL algorithms (as assessed by the assignments).
• Describe (list and define) multiple criteria for analyzing RL algorithms and evaluate algorithms on these metrics: e.g. regret, sample complexity, computational complexity, empirical performance, convergence, etc (as assessed by assignments and the exam).
• Describe the exploration vs exploitation challenge and compare and contrast at least two approaches for addressing this challenge (in terms of performance, scalability, complexity of implementation, and theoretical guarantees) (as assessed by an assignment and the exam).

There is no official textbook for the class but a number of the supporting readings will come from:

• Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, Sutton and Barto, 2nd Edition. This is available for free here and references will refer to the final pdf version available here.

Some other additional references that may be useful are listed below:

• Reinforcement Learning: State-of-the-Art, Marco Wiering and Martijn van Otterlo, Eds. [link]
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig.[link]
• Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville. [link]
• David Silver's course on Reinforcement Learning [link]