Reinforcement learning and its applications in particle accelerators at CERN

An hands-on crash course on Reinforcement Learning (RL) delivered to CERN openlab summer students, in the context of CERN openlab summer student lecture programme, with the goal of explaining the potential of RL and its real-world applications in particle accelerators at CERN. The course focused in particular on learning by doing, solving exercises together to better grasp the sometimes abstract concepts of RL.

The lecture was divided in two sessions:

1. Introduction to RL + exercises on Markov Decision Process (MDP): https://indico.cern.ch/event/1402869/
2. RL applications for particle accelerators at CERN + exercises on SARSA, Q-learning, and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DQN model): https://indico.cern.ch/event/1438484/

Teaching materials:

• Slides
• Exercises notebook