MO-GRPO: Mitigating Reward Hacking of Group Relative Policy Optimization on Multi-Objective Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ichihara, Yuki, Jinnai, Yuu, Morimura, Tetsuro, Sakamoto, Mitsuki, Mitsuhashi, Ryota, Uchibe, Eiji
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ichihara, Yuki
Jinnai, Yuu
Morimura, Tetsuro
Sakamoto, Mitsuki
Mitsuhashi, Ryota
Uchibe, Eiji
author_facet Ichihara, Yuki
Jinnai, Yuu
Morimura, Tetsuro
Sakamoto, Mitsuki
Mitsuhashi, Ryota
Uchibe, Eiji
contents Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been shown to be an effective algorithm when an accurate reward model is available. However, such a highly reliable reward model is not available in many real-world tasks. In this paper, we particularly focus on multi-objective settings, in which we identify that GRPO is vulnerable to reward hacking, optimizing only one of the objectives at the cost of the others. To address this issue, we propose MO-GRPO, an extension of GRPO with a simple normalization method to reweight the reward functions automatically according to the variances of their values. We first show analytically that MO-GRPO ensures that all reward functions contribute evenly to the loss function while preserving the order of preferences, eliminating the need for manual tuning of the reward functions' scales. Then, we evaluate MO-GRPO experimentally in four domains: (i) the multi-armed bandits problem, (ii) simulated control task (Mo-Gymnasium), (iii) machine translation tasks on the WMT benchmark (En-Ja, En-Zh), and (iv) instruction following task. MO-GRPO achieves stable learning by evenly distributing correlations among the components of rewards, outperforming GRPO, showing MO-GRPO to be a promising algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22047
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MO-GRPO: Mitigating Reward Hacking of Group Relative Policy Optimization on Multi-Objective Problems
Ichihara, Yuki
Jinnai, Yuu
Morimura, Tetsuro
Sakamoto, Mitsuki
Mitsuhashi, Ryota
Uchibe, Eiji
Machine Learning
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been shown to be an effective algorithm when an accurate reward model is available. However, such a highly reliable reward model is not available in many real-world tasks. In this paper, we particularly focus on multi-objective settings, in which we identify that GRPO is vulnerable to reward hacking, optimizing only one of the objectives at the cost of the others. To address this issue, we propose MO-GRPO, an extension of GRPO with a simple normalization method to reweight the reward functions automatically according to the variances of their values. We first show analytically that MO-GRPO ensures that all reward functions contribute evenly to the loss function while preserving the order of preferences, eliminating the need for manual tuning of the reward functions' scales. Then, we evaluate MO-GRPO experimentally in four domains: (i) the multi-armed bandits problem, (ii) simulated control task (Mo-Gymnasium), (iii) machine translation tasks on the WMT benchmark (En-Ja, En-Zh), and (iv) instruction following task. MO-GRPO achieves stable learning by evenly distributing correlations among the components of rewards, outperforming GRPO, showing MO-GRPO to be a promising algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning problems.
title MO-GRPO: Mitigating Reward Hacking of Group Relative Policy Optimization on Multi-Objective Problems
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22047