The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting the focus from single, verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios, imposing significant challenges on the post-training phase. In these settings, the scale and complexity of reward systems have grown significantly, transitioning toward multi-objective formulations that encompass a comprehensive spectrum of model capabilities and application contexts. However, traditional methods typically rely on fixed reward weights, ignoring non-stationary learning dynamics and struggling with data heterogeneity across dimensions. To address these issues, we propose SPARD, a framework that establishes an automated, self-paced curriculum by perceiving learning progress to dynamically adjust multi-objective reward weights and data importance, thereby synchronizing learning intent with data utility for optimal performance. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SPARD significantly enhances model capabilities across all domains.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Illustration of the standard Multi-Reward RL loop and examples of training characteristics across diverse data types. The upper panel depicts the workflow of generating multi-reward via an LLM judge and aggregating them for policy updates. The lower panel highlights data heterogeneity , demonstrating that different types of input data differentially impact specific reward dimensions during training.
Figure 2: The framework of SPARD, which consists of two main synergistic mechanisms: (1) Progress-Aware Weight Adaptation dynamically adjusts reward weights ( wr ) based on the reliability of performance gains, and (2) Reward-Attributed Data Rebalancing computes data weights ( wd ) by aggregating reward importance via a reward-attribute matrix derived from score dispersion. These components jointly guide the optimization to prioritize current learning objectives and leverage the most efficient data.
Methods
General Capability
Creative Writing
Chat
AVG
IFEval
GPQA
LCB
Arena-Hard
CW
MT-Bench
WildBench
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
Base
70.79
33.84
39.75
10.70
48.09
77.93
41.72
46.12
+ SFT
59.70
32.83
35.00
12.50
41.85
77.56
24.05
40.50
+ DPO
74.67
33.54
39.50
12.70
50.49
78.37
43.60
47.55
+ GRPOrm
73.56
34.85
39.75
11.20
50.17
78.12
41.77
47.06
Table 1: Overall performance comparison on multiple benchmarks. The bold font indicates the best results and an underline indicates the second-best results.
Figure 3: Training trajectories for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. To facilitate a clearer comparison of long-term trends and to reduce the visual impact of short-term fluctuations, all curves are smoothed using an exponential moving average (EMA).
Method
IF
GPQA
LCB
CW
MT
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
SPARD
75.78
38.38
41.75
52.49
81.38
w/o PAWA
74.86
37.88
41.75
51.24
80.25
w/o RADR
73.56
36.36
40.00
51.87
80.93
Qwen3-8B
SPARD
88.17
49.49
54.75
73.95
78.31
Table 2: Ablation study on the core mechanisms in SPARD. The bold font indicates the best results and an underline indicates the second-best results.
Method
IF
GPQA
LCB
CW
MT
3b
Base
60.07
27.78
27.00
40.17
73.37
+Avg
64.51
30.81
26.75
43.41
73.68
+Ours
65.24
31.31
28.50
44.16
74.25
14b
Base
78.03
46.97
46.50
55.80
79.84
+ Avg
79.48
45.45
47.50
60.02
82.25
+ Ours
80.96
46.97
47.25
60.63
84.88
Table 3: Model Performance Across Different Sizes. Avg refers to the method GRPOavg , which averages rewards across dimensions.
Appendix figures & tables12 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 4: Distribution of selected data sources in the WildChat-IF dataset.
Figure 5: Training dynamics for Correctness, Detail, Fluent, Instruction Following.
Figure 6: Training dynamics for Logic, Relevant, Structure, and Tune.
Figure 7: Data Weight Change During Training Process
Figure 8: Reward Weight Change During Training Process
Hyperparameter
Value
Batch size
32
Epochs
1
Learning rate
5e-6
Warmup ratio
0.05
Weight decay
0.1
Adam betas
(0.9, 0.95)
Appendix
Table 4: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) hyperparameters used in our experiments.
Reinforcement learning post-training adapts pretrained models with reward or feedback signals to improve reasoning, alignment, and interactive behavior.
Although multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is central to aligning large language models with complex human preferences, the prevailing practice of static weighted summation overlooks a more fundamental phenomenon: reward learning is markedly asynchronous across objectives. Well-learned dimensions quickly produce homogeneous, low-variance signals whose residual noise contaminates the aggregated reward (in GRPO) or occupies a fixed share of the advantage budget (in GDPO), interfering with the scarce yet high-value signals carried by under-learned dimensions. To address this asynchrony, we propose Stage-Aware Dynamic Weighting (SAW), a lightweight, algorithm-agnostic dynamic weighting mechanism. SAW utilizes the coefficient of variation (CV) as a scale-invariant proxy for real-time informativeness, reweighting each dimension's reward or advantage contribution by its relative informativeness within the batch. Unlike gradient-based methods that require multiple forward and backward passes, SAW relies solely on batch-level statistics, introducing nearly negligible computational overhead. Experiments on tool-calling and text summarization tasks demonstrate that SAW consistently improves both training efficiency and final performance under both GRPO and GDPO frameworks, confirming it as a general-purpose plug-in for multi-reward LLM alignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhaolutuan/SAW
Yuchen He, Baolong Bi, Shenghua Liu +7
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Large language model alignment via reinforcement learning depends critically on reward function quality. However, static, domain-specific reward models are often costly to train and exhibit poor generalization in out-of-distribution scenarios encountered during RL iterations. We present RLAR (Reinforcement Learning from Agent Rewards), an agent-driven framework that dynamically assigns tailored reward functions to individual queries. Specifically, RLAR transforms reward acquisition into a dynamic tool synthesis and invocation task. It leverages LLM agents to autonomously retrieve optimal reward models from the Internet and synthesize programmatic verifiers through code generation. This allows the reward system to self-evolve with the shifting data distributions during training. Experimental results demonstrate that RLAR yields consistent performance gains ranging from 10 to 60 across mathematics, coding, translation, and dialogue tasks. On RewardBench-V2, RLAR significantly outperforms static baselines and approaches the performance upper bound, demonstrating superior generalization through dynamic reward orchestration. The data and code are available on this link: https://github.com/ZhuoerFeng/RLAR.
Modern large language models (LLMs) are expected not just to answer correctly, but to adapt their behavior to different human values and use cases. As a result, multi-reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly important problem for LLMs, where each reward captures a different aspect of desired behavior. However, optimizing with multiple rewards suffers from a more severe alignment tax issue, where different optimization objectives can trade off or even conflict with each other, leading to unstable and inefficient post-training. In this work, we propose PRISM, a new multi-reward RL framework built upon the idea of policy-space decomposition and composition. Instead of compositing different rewards, PRISM optimizes a set of standalone positive policies and a global negative policy. This alleviates the potential conflict during multi-reward policy optimization, while enabling controllability during inference by flexible policy composition. Experiments on scientific reasoning, tool-use reasoning, and helpfulness-safety alignment show that PRISM consistently outperforms existing multi-reward RL baselines, with extra controllability for inference-time preference control.
Ruiming Liang, Yi Zhong, Yizhen Yuan +6
1Fundation Model Research Center, CASIA · School of Artificial Intelligence, UCAS · Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University +1