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Iterative Foundation Model Fine-Tuning on Multiple Rewards

Machine Learning 2025-11-04 v1

Abstract

Fine-tuning foundation models has emerged as a powerful approach for generating objects with specific desired properties. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an effective framework for this purpose, enabling models to generate outputs that maximize a given reward function. However, in many applications such as text generation and drug discovery, it can be suboptimal to optimize using a single reward signal, as multiple evaluation criteria are often necessary. This paper proposes a novel reinforcement learning-based method for fine-tuning foundation models using multiple reward signals. By employing an iterative fine-tuning strategy across these rewards, our approach generalizes state-of-the-art RL-based methods. We further provide a theoretical analysis that offers insights into the performance of multi-reward RL fine-tuning. Experimental results across diverse domains including text, biological sequence, and small molecule generation, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.00220,
  title  = {Iterative Foundation Model Fine-Tuning on Multiple Rewards},
  author = {Pouya M. Ghari and Simone Sciabola and Ye Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.00220},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to NeurIPS 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:16:28.646Z