MOUNTAIN CAR

PROBLEM
USING TEMPORAL DIFFERENCE(TD)
& VALUE ITERATION(VI)
REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
ALRORITHMS
By
Muzammil Abdulrahman
&
Yusuf Garba Dambatta
Mevlana University Konya, Turkey
2013
 INTRODUCTION
The aim of the mountain car problem is for the
car to learn on two continuous variables;
• position and
• velocity
So that it can reach the top of the mountain in a
minimum number of steps.
By starting the car from rest, its engine power
alone will not be powerful enough to bring the
car over the hill in front.
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 INTRODUCTION CONT.

To climb up the hill, the car would need to swing back
and forth inside the valley
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 INTRODUCTION CONT.
By accelerating forward and backward in order
to gather momentum.
The agent receives a negative reward at every
time step when the goal is not reached
The agent has no information about the goal
until an initial success, it uses reinforcement
learning methods.
In this project, we employed TD-Q learning and
value iteration algorithms
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 REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
Reinforcement learning is orthogonal learning
algorithm in the field of machine learning
Where an estimation of the correctness of the
answer is provided to the system
 It deals with how an agent should take an action
in an environment so as to maximize a
cumulative reward
It is a Learning from interaction
And is a Goal-oriented learning
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 CHARACTERISTICS
 No direct training examples – (delayed) rewards instead
Goal-oriented learning
Learning about, from, and while interacting with
an external environment
 Need for exploration of environment & exploitation
 The environment might be stochastic and/or unknown
 The learning actions of the agent affect future rewards

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 EXAMPLES

Robot moving in an environment

 EXAMPLES

 Chess Master

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 UNSUPERVISED LEARNING

Training Info = Evaluation(rewards/penalties)

Input RL System Output(actions)

Objectives: Get as much reward as possible

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 SUPERVISED LEARNING

Training Info = desired (target) outputs

Input Supervised Learning Output

System

Training example = {input (state), target output}

Error = (target output – actual output)

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TEMPORAL DIFFERENCE(TD)
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a
prediction method.
It has been mostly used for solving the
reinforcement learning problem.
TD learning is a combination of Monte Carlo
ideas and dynamic programming (DP) ideas.

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 TD Q-LEARNING

The update of TD Q-Learning looks as follows

Q (a, s) Q (a, s) + α [(R(s) + γ maxaı Q (aı, sı) - Q (a, s)]

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 TD Q-LEARNING ALGORITHM
Initialize Q values for all states ‘s’ and actions ‘a’
Obtain the current state
Select an action according to current state
Implement the selected action and obtain an immediate
reward and the next state
Update the Q function according to the above equation
Update the system state
Stop the algorithm if the maximum number of iteration
is reached
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ε -GREEDY SELECTION (Q,S,EPSILON)
The agent randomly select action from Q table
based on e-greedy strategy.
Initially, epsilon=0.01 which is the probability of
selecting random action.
It will be approximately equal to zero, when the
car agent has fully learned how to climb the
front hill (no randomness because it has learned
about best action).

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 STATE, ACTION & REWARD
State: The states are position and speed. Position is
between the range of -1.5 and 0.55 and speed is
between the range of -0.07 and 0.07
Action: The agent has one of these 3 actions at all
the time: Forward, backward, neutral (Forward
accelaration=+1m/s2, backward deccelaration
=-1m/s2 , neutral=0 m/s2).
Reward: The agent receive a reward of -1 for all
actions except when the agent reaches the goal
state where it receives a 0 reward 15
 VALUE ITERATION
The value iteration algorithm which is also called
backward induction
Combines policy improvement and a truncated
policy evaluation into a single update step

V (s) = R(s) + γ max ∑ T (s, a, s) V (s′)

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 VALUE ITERATION ALGORITHM

Inputs: (S, A,T, R, γ), ε: threshold value

Initialize V0 for state ‘s’ and action ‘a’
for each compute the next approximation using Bellman
backup equation.
V(s) R(s) + γ max ∑ T (s, a, s) V (s′)
δ V (s′) -V(s)
Until δ < ε
Return V
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 GRAPHICAL RESULTS
The graph shows the relation between RMS
value (also called policy-loss) and the number of
episodes.
RMS value is the error between the current Q
value and the previous Q value.
With any probability, an agent chooses action
randomly. If the choosen action happen to be
bad, it will cause instant rise in error.
At convergence, the error is approximately zero.
In our case, convergence is reached when 3 or
more successive RMS value equals 0.0001 or less18
The car in the mountain will be displayed at 11th
iteration to visualize how the car agent learns.

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GRAPH

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 CONT.

Figure show the graph of Total Reward vs Episode at 1000th episode

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 RESULT CONT.
The car in the mountain will be displayed at 11th
iteration to visualize how the car agent learns.
After 11th iteration, it will be stopped to reduce
the time it takes to converge.
After 3 or more successive RMS values equals
0.001 or less, the car will be displayed again to
show how it has fully learned how to reach goal
state at any episode maintaining constant steps.

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 VI RESULTS
 The graph below shows the convergence error
over iterations

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 VI CONT.

Figure 6 shows the graph of Optimal Positions and Velocities over time on top
while bottom one displays the car learning in the mountain.
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 VI CONT.
 The first Episode records the highest error
 This is because the error is the difference
between the current value function and the
previous value function i.e. Error= V (s′) -V(s)
But initially the previous value function is 0
Hence Error= V (s′)

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 VI CONT.
 At subsequent episodes, the error keeps
decreasing as the next updated value functions
increase.
At convergence, the error (with 0 value) is less

ε
than the threshold value ( =0.0001) which is
the termination criteria for this project.
 Finally the optimal policy will be returned.

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 VI CONT.
 The graphs below shows the optimal positions
and velocities over time
 The first graph is that of the optimal positions
over time
 It simply shows the optimal positions attained by
the car as it attempt to reach the goal state at
different time

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 CONT.
 Also the second graph shows the optimal
velocities attained by the car as it attempt to
reach the goal state at different time
The car initially accelerate from rest position to
attain a position of -0.2 it then swings back to
gather enough momentum by attaining a
position of -0.95, it finally accelerate forward
again and reach the goal state

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 CONCLUSION
In this project, the temporal difference and value
iteration learning algorithms were implemented for
mountain car problem. Both the algorithms were
guaranteed to converge by determining the
optimal policy for reaching the goal state.

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