A Better Spur Should Start From Each Objective

Abstract:Real-world Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) often suffers from sparse rewards, reward conflicts, and late-stage reward tug-of-war, causing traditional linear scalarization to experience severe metric oscillations. To address optimization conflicts among multiple objectives in real-world deployment scenarios, we propose Multi-Marginal Preference Optimization (MMPO), a fine-grained framework that intervenes at the data, gradient, and constraint levels rather than relying on coarse-grained global scalarization. Specifically, MMPO performs exposure debiasing to mitigate sparse and biased rewards, applies priority-aware orthogonal projection to decouple conflicting gradients, and introduces self-prompted gradient constraints to prevent dominant objectives from overwhelming weaker ones. Experiments on real-world e-commerce datasets show that MMPO improves training stability and consistently achieves better performance across conflicting metrics. Moreover, it generalizes robustly to broader tasks such as ToolRL and code generation, demonstrating its effectiveness as a practical paradigm for multi-objective alignment.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.08211 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.08211v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08211 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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