English

Multi-Objective and Mixed-Reward Reinforcement Learning via Reward-Decorrelated Policy Optimization

Machine Learning 2026-05-14 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Complex reinforcement learning environments frequently employ multi-task and mixed-reward formulations. In these settings, heterogeneous reward distributions and correlated reward dimensions often destabilize the construction of scalar advantages. To address these challenges, we propose Reward-Decorrelated Policy Optimization (RDPO), a reward-processing method designed to explicitly target both failure modes. RDPO first utilizes Magnitude-Aware Quantile normalization to stabilize prompt-level advantage allocation across binary, fractional, and continuous rewards. It then applies Mahalanobis whitening within each active reward subspace to mitigate correlation redundancy prior to aggregation. When applied during the post-training of LongCat-Flash, RDPO enhances instruction following, writing quality, and robustness to hard prompts while remaining broadly competitive on reasoning and coding evaluations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.13641,
  title  = {Multi-Objective and Mixed-Reward Reinforcement Learning via Reward-Decorrelated Policy Optimization},
  author = {Yang Bai and Kaiyuan Liu and Ziyuan Zhuang and Jiahong Zhou and Rongxiang Weng and Xin Chen and Jingang Wang and Xunliang Cai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.13641},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:10:22.350Z