CMPT 729: Reinforcement Learning


Reinforcement learning is the branch of machine learning that studies learning to act. Agents observe, predict, and act to change their environment. Reinforcement learning has notable success in learning to play games and control robots. In this course, we will cover fundamental concepts and algorithms, and introduce techniques that underlie many of the successes from reinforcement learning.

Instructor: Jason Peng (Office Hour: Wed 1:30-2:00pm TASC 9007)

TA: Anandharaju Raju (Office Hour: Thu 4-5pm Zoom)

Lectures:
    Monday 12:30pm-2:20pm (WMC 2202)
    Wednesday 12:30pm-1:20pm (WMC 3210)


Grading

3 programming assignments (30%)
Paper presentation (20%)
Course project (50%)
Late days: You have 3 late days that you can use for any assignment. You can distribute the late days however you like, but they can only be applied to programming assignments. Once you run out of late days, any late assignments will no longer be accepted.


Syllabus

Sep 3: Introduction
             

Sep 8: MDP
             

Sep 10: Policy Evaluation
             

Sep 15: Policy Evaluation, Behavioral Cloning
             

Sep 17: No Class
             

Sep 22: Behavioral Cloning
             

Sep 24: Policy Search
             

Sep 29: Policy Gradient
             

Oct 1: Policy Gradient
             

Oct 6: Q-Learning
             

Oct 8: Actor-Critic Algorithms
             

Oct 13: No Class - Thanksgiving
             

Oct 15: Actor-Critic Algorithms
             

Oct 20: Model-Based RL
             

Oct 22: On-Policy vs Off-Policy Algorithms
             

Oct 27: Advance Policy Gradient, Paper Presentations
             

Oct 29: Advance Policy Gradient
             

Nov 3: Advance Q-Learning, Paper Presentations
             

Nov 5: Advance Q-Learning
             

Nov 10: Exploration, Paper Presentations
             

Nov 12: Exploration
             

Nov 17: Domain Transfer. Paper Presentations
             

Nov 19: Domain Transfer
             

Nov 24: Project Presentations
             

Nov 26: Project Presentations
             

Dec 1: Project Presentations