[HN Gopher] Mathematical Foundations of Reinforcement Learning
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Mathematical Foundations of Reinforcement Learning
        
       Author : ibobev
       Score  : 122 points
       Date   : 2025-03-10 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | dualofdual wrote:
       | The best lectures on Reinforcement Learning and related topics
       | are by Dimitris Bertsekas:
       | https://web.mit.edu/dimitrib/www/home.html
        
         | rybthrow2 wrote:
         | Also one by David Silver of Deepmind, AlphaGo fame are good
         | too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWv7GOvuf0
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | His books tend to be dry and geared towards researchers, in my
         | opinion. He has a new one on RL:
         | https://web.mit.edu/dimitrib/www/RLCOURSECOMPLETE%202ndEDITI...
        
           | joe_lin wrote:
           | I'm looking for content (researcher myself) -- mainly on the
           | application side. Should I start with this one? Or anything
           | else?
           | 
           | Very curious about RL for LLMs for example (using data from
           | real use).
        
             | esafak wrote:
             | I have not read it but it looks like a comprehensive
             | reference. For a more applied treatment see _Foundations of
             | Deep Reinforcement Learning_. https://slm-
             | lab.gitbook.io/slm-lab/publications-and-talks/in...
             | 
             | Neither cover LLMs. I don't follow the literature closely
             | so I can only suggest you read papers:
             | https://github.com/WindyLab/LLM-RL-Papers
        
         | forkerenok wrote:
         | Would you mind explicitly indicating whether you have reviewed
         | the submitted materials? And if so, why is it inferior to the
         | material you linked?
         | 
         | Not trying to catch you, genuine interest.
        
         | richard___ wrote:
         | No. They are outdated and focused on strange things. You wont
         | understand ppo from his textbooks
        
       | lemonlym wrote:
       | Another great resource on RL is Mykel Kochenderfer's suite of
       | textbooks: https://algorithmsbook.com/
        
         | noobly wrote:
         | These books are all RL? I've got the decision one, I didn't
         | think the other had anything to do with RL.
        
       | kristjansson wrote:
       | Also worth mentioning Murphy's WIP textbook[0] focused entirely
       | on RL, which is an outgrowth of his excellent ML textbooks.
       | 
       | [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265
        
       | ivanbelenky wrote:
       | Awesome resource, in case someone is interested I implemented
       | most of suttons book here https://github.com/ivanbelenky/RL
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-03-10 23:00 UTC)