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When Gradients Collide: Failure Modes of Multi-Objective Prompt Optimization for LLM Judges

Computation and Language 2026-05-26 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Multiagent Systems Software Engineering

Abstract

Customizing an LLM judge to a specific task or domain often involves optimizing its prompt across multiple evaluation criteria simultaneously. Textual gradient methods automate this for a single judge criterion, however they produce natural-language critiques, not numerical vectors. Thus, the conflict-resolution toolkit of multi-task learning (PCGrad, MGDA) doesn't apply to the multi-objective textual gradient setting. We test five decomposition modes of textual gradient optimizers by varying how much cross-task information the loss, gradient and optimizer LLMs share. In 6 of 10 configurations, we observe that optimization never improves over the initial prompt. Gradient specificity drops by 59% (from 9.0 to 3.7) when the gradient LLM processes multiple criteria jointly. Separately, we observe that naively combining per-task instructions into a single prompt degrades Spearman's rho by -5.3%. These results identify two separable failure modes: optimization-time gradient dilution and inference-time instruction interference, which together constrain the design space for multi-objective judge customization using textual feedback.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26046,
  title  = {When Gradients Collide: Failure Modes of Multi-Objective Prompt Optimization for LLM Judges},
  author = {Parth Darshan and Abhishek Divekar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26046},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ACL 2026 CustomNLP4U Workshop. Code, prompts and data available at https://github.com/ARDivekar/PromptMOO

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:32:54.265Z