Deepmind – Reinforcement Learning Lecture Series (2021)

In the past, I was very skeptical of NLP efforts. Thought it was mostly full of cool toys.

I was dead wrong.

I am similarly skeptical of RL, in the sense that for most cases you are better of using optimal control techniques, and maybe sometimes a combination of RL and optimal control.

I am aware of AlphaZero and other impressive achievements in certain games. However, I am still left with the feeling that it is very expensive to train an RL model and it is insanely specific to the task at hand.

Are there recent breakthroughs that point at promising generalization in the RL community?

This is a more up to date version of David Silver’s course and judging from the few lectures I watched, it is very good but if you haven’t, I recommend having a look at Silver’s lectures, too. He is an amazing teacher and it is a joy to watch him explain something. https://www.deepmind.com/learning-resources/introduction-to-...

David Silver's reinforcement learning lecture series is excellent as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWv7GOvuf0&list=PLzuuYNsE1E...

I think this is an excellent resource. I used to work at DeepMind, and Hado & Matteo are two of the best RL researchers there.