Welcome to the webpage of the master course 'Reinforcement Learning' taught at Leiden University

Welcome to the master course "Reinforcement Learning", which will run in the spring of 2024. The course consists of 14 weeks, in which you hand in 3 assignments, and make a final exam. Reinforcement Learning is an interesting topic -- how can we make computers learn like animals and humans -- and we try to make this course as much fun as well. The course teaches RL theory, but also has a strong practical focus, with several graded assignments about hands-on deep reinforcement learning. 

Instructors: Aske Plaat, Thomas Moerland, Zhao Yang, Felix Kleuker, Márton Fejér.  

Important information

• In-person education: The course is taught in person. Reinforcement Learning is NOT an online course!

• Brightspace: We use Brightspace for all communication throughout the course: announcements, delivering slides, handing-out & handing in assignments, providing grades, content questions (forum), etc. 

• Attend the lectures: You should attend all lectures if you want to pass the course. The lecture slides are on Brightspace. Do not come if you are sick. Ask a friend for their lecture notes. Or re-read the chapter in the book, go over the slides, and ask questions when you have recovered.

• Assignments & practicals: The assignments are the core learning experience of the course. You are encouraged to work on the assignments during the practical and ask the TAs your questions.

• Read the book: In order to pass this course, you must also read the book (see Literature) -- lectures only is not enough. Read the chapter before you come to the lecture. Ask questions. The teachers are friendly -- they have been specially selected -- and love answering questions. 

• Prior knowledge: The course is about DEEP Reinforcement Learning. We assume that you are familiar with classical supervised machine learning and with deep learning. In the past we have provided a special refresher summary lecture based on Appendix B of the book. The slides are still on Brightspace. We do not give this lecture anymore, due to lack of demand. Appendix B of the book may still be useful.