Jan 14

Lecture 1

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning

Basic probability theory review.

Additional Reading:
High level introduction: Sutton and Barto Chp 1 Review background materials on Basic Probability.
Notes on Basic Probability.

Jan 21

Lecture 2

Markov Process, Markov Reward Process.

Markov Decision Process, Policy Evaluation.

Additional Reading:
Sutton and Barto Chp 3, 4.1

Jan 24

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 will be posted online.

Jan 28

Lecture 3

Policy Improvement, Policy Iteration, Value Iteration

Additional Reading:
Sutton and Barto Chp 4

Feb 4

Lecture 4

Monte Carlo and Time Difference Methods, Q-Learning

Additional Reading:
Sutton and Barto Chp 5.1, 5.2, 5.4, 5.5, 6.1-6.5, 6.7

Feb 11

Lecture 5

Value Function Approximation, Deep Learning

Additional Reading:
Sutton and Barto Chp 9.3, 9.6, 9.7
Stanford's Deep Learning Notes

Feb 14

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 due at midnight (i.e., 11:59 PM, 23:59) eastern time.

Feb 15

Assignment 2

Assignment 2 will be posted online.

Feb 18

Lecture 6

Deep learning, Deep Q-Learning

Additional Reading:
Stanford's Deep Learning Notes
Playing Atari with Deep RL

Mar 4

Lecture 7

Imitation learning. Policy Search.

Additional Reading:
Sutton and Barto Chp 13
See slides on D2L.

Mar 11

Lecture 8

Policy Search. Multi-armed bandit. Exploration

Additional Reading:
Sutton and Barto Chp 13
Sutton and Barto Chp 2
Lattimore and Szepesvari Chp 7.1

Mar 14

Assignment 2

Assignment 2 due at midnight (i.e., 11:59 PM, 23:59) eastern time.

Mar 18

Lecture 9

Exploration/Exploitation. Batch Reinforcement Learning

Additional Reading:
Sutton and Barto Chp 2
Lattimore and Szepesvari Chp 35
See slides on D2L.

Mar 25

Lecture 10

Monte Carlo Tree Search.

Students Paper Presentations.

Additional Reading:
See slides on D2L

Apr 1

Lecture 11

Students Paper Presentations.

Additional Reading:
See slides on D2L.

Apr 8

Lecture 12

Students Paper Presentations.

Additional Reading:
See slides on D2L.

Apr 19

Final Project

Final Project report due at midnight (i.e., 11:59 PM, 23:59) eastern time.