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Blockwise Advantage Estimation for Multi-Objective RL with Verifiable Rewards

Machine Learning 2026-02-12 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) assigns a single scalar advantage to all tokens in a completion. For structured generations with explicit segments and objectives, this couples unrelated reward signals across segments, leading to objective interference and misattributed credit. We propose Blockwise Advantage Estimation, a family of GRPO-compatible methods that assigns each objective its own advantage and applies it only to the tokens in the corresponding text block, reducing reliance on hand-designed scalar rewards and scaling naturally to additional objectives. A key challenge is estimating advantages for later blocks whose rewards are conditioned on sampled prefixes; standard unbiased approaches require expensive nested rollouts from intermediate states. Concretely, we introduce an Outcome-Conditioned Baseline that approximates intermediate state values using only within-group statistics by stratifying samples according to a prefix-derived intermediate outcome. On math tasks with uncertainty estimation, our method mitigates reward interference, is competitive with a state-of-the-art reward-designed approach, and preserves test-time gains from confidence-weighted ensembling. More broadly, it provides a modular recipe for optimizing sequential objectives in structured generations without additional rollouts.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.10231,
  title  = {Blockwise Advantage Estimation for Multi-Objective RL with Verifiable Rewards},
  author = {Kirill Pavlenko and Alexander Golubev and Simon Karasik and Boris Yangel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.10231},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:30:37.412Z