English

PRISM: Parallel Reward Integration with Symmetry for MORL

Machine Learning 2026-02-23 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

This work studies heterogeneous Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL), where objectives can differ sharply in temporal frequency. Such heterogeneity allows dense objectives to dominate learning, while sparse long-horizon rewards receive weak credit assignment, leading to poor sample efficiency. We propose a Parallel Reward Integration with Symmetry (PRISM) algorithm that enforces reflectional symmetry as an inductive bias in aligning reward channels. PRISM introduces ReSymNet, a theory-motivated model that reconciles temporal-frequency mismatches across objectives, using residual blocks to learn a scaled opportunity value that accelerates exploration while preserving the optimal policy. We also propose SymReg, a reflectional equivariance regulariser that enforces agent mirroring and constrains policy search to a reflection-equivariant subspace. This restriction provably reduces hypothesis complexity and improves generalisation. Across MuJoCo benchmarks, PRISM consistently outperforms both a sparse-reward baseline and an oracle trained with full dense rewards, improving Pareto coverage and distributional balance: it achieves hypervolume gains exceeding 100\% over the baseline and up to 32\% over the oracle. The code is at \href{https://github.com/EVIEHub/PRISM}{https://github.com/EVIEHub/PRISM}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.18277,
  title  = {PRISM: Parallel Reward Integration with Symmetry for MORL},
  author = {Finn van der Knaap and Kejiang Qian and Zheng Xu and Fengxiang He},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18277},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:44:17.295Z