APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Dongliang, Zhuang, Xinlin, Xu, Junjie, Xie, Luojian, Wang, Zehui, Zhuang, Jiaxi, Yang, Haolin, Dou, Liang, He, Xiao, Wu, Xingjiao, Qian, Ying
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chen, Dongliang
Zhuang, Xinlin
Xu, Junjie
Xie, Luojian
Wang, Zehui
Zhuang, Jiaxi
Yang, Haolin
Dou, Liang
He, Xiao
Wu, Xingjiao
Qian, Ying
author_facet Chen, Dongliang
Zhuang, Xinlin
Xu, Junjie
Xie, Luojian
Wang, Zehui
Zhuang, Jiaxi
Yang, Haolin
Dou, Liang
He, Xiao
Wu, Xingjiao
Qian, Ying
contents Multi-objective alignment for text-to-image generation is commonly implemented via static linear scalarization, but fixed weights often fail under heterogeneous rewards, leading to optimization imbalance where models overfit high-variance, high-responsiveness objectives (e.g., OCR) while under-optimizing perceptual goals. We identify two mechanistic causes: variance hijacking, where reward dispersion induces implicit reweighting that dominates the normalized training signal, and gradient conflicts, where competing objectives produce opposing update directions and trigger seesaw-like oscillations. We propose APEX (Adaptive Priority-based Efficient X-objective Alignment), which stabilizes heterogeneous rewards with Dual-Stage Adaptive Normalization and dynamically schedules objectives via P^3 Adaptive Priorities that combine learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need. On Stable Diffusion 3.5, APEX achieves improved Pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives, with balanced gains of +1.31 PickScore, +0.35 DeQA, and +0.53 Aesthetics while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy, mitigating the instability of multi-objective alignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_06574
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation
Chen, Dongliang
Zhuang, Xinlin
Xu, Junjie
Xie, Luojian
Wang, Zehui
Zhuang, Jiaxi
Yang, Haolin
Dou, Liang
He, Xiao
Wu, Xingjiao
Qian, Ying
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multi-objective alignment for text-to-image generation is commonly implemented via static linear scalarization, but fixed weights often fail under heterogeneous rewards, leading to optimization imbalance where models overfit high-variance, high-responsiveness objectives (e.g., OCR) while under-optimizing perceptual goals. We identify two mechanistic causes: variance hijacking, where reward dispersion induces implicit reweighting that dominates the normalized training signal, and gradient conflicts, where competing objectives produce opposing update directions and trigger seesaw-like oscillations. We propose APEX (Adaptive Priority-based Efficient X-objective Alignment), which stabilizes heterogeneous rewards with Dual-Stage Adaptive Normalization and dynamically schedules objectives via P^3 Adaptive Priorities that combine learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need. On Stable Diffusion 3.5, APEX achieves improved Pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives, with balanced gains of +1.31 PickScore, +0.35 DeQA, and +0.53 Aesthetics while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy, mitigating the instability of multi-objective alignment.
title APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06574