README.md

Cartpole Balancer using Double Deep Q-Learning

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This project uses double deep Q-learning to train an agent in Cartpole-V1 environment of Open AI's Gym. It takes inspiration from this paper by Google DeepMind.

The model consists of a target network that trains the main network by functioning as the TD target. These networks are synced at regular intervals to stabilize training. Furthermore, a replay buffer is used to store the agent's experience and break correlation when training the main network.

Given:

• $Q_{1}$: Main network
• $Q_{2}$: Target network

$Y_{target} = r_{t+1} + \gamma \cdot \max_{a'} Q_2(s_{t+1}, a')$

$MSL = \mathbb{E}\left[\left(Y - Q_1(s, a)\right)^2\right]$

Integrating double Q-learning helps eliminate the problem of overestimation bias by incorporating randomness.

$Y^{DDQN} = r_{t+1} + \gamma \cdot Q_2(s_{t+1}, \arg\max_{a'} Q_1(s_{t+1}, a'))$

• Agent() class:

1. q_net: the main network i.e online network. ($Q_1$)
2. target_net: the target network. ($Q_2$)
3. sync_net(): function to sync weights of $Q_1$ and $Q_2$.
4. target_vals() & q_vals: functions for forward pass of target and main network.

• ReplayBuffer() class:

1. buffer_size, n_env, device: size of the replay buffer from which mini batch is sampled, number of parallel environments for sampling experience and the device available for training.
2. add(): adds observation, next observation, action, reward and dones to the buffer. Also, implements FIFO functionality in case the buffer overflows.
3. sample(): randomly samples a mini-batch from replay buffer.

• ret_e(): anneals the epsilon to adjust exploration-exploitation tradeoff.
• calc_TD_target(): calculates the TD target. ($Y_{target}$)
• calc_TD_target_DDQN(): calculates TD target according to double Q-learning rule. ($Y^{DDQN}_{target}$)
• e_greedy_policy(): samples actions according to e-greedy policy.
• hyper: an easyDict to store hyperparameters.

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