Distributional Reinforcement Learning

The first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, providing a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions from a probabilistic perspective. Distributional reinforcement learning is a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions. Going beyond the common approach to reinforcement learning and expected values, it focuses on the total reward or return obtained as a consequence of an agent's choices—specifically, how this return behaves from a probabilistic perspective. In this first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney, and Mark Rowland, who spearheaded development of the field, present its key concepts and review some of its many applications. They demonstrate its power to account for many complex, interesting phenomena that arise from interactions with one's environment. The authors present core ideas from classical reinforcement learning to contextualize