PRISM: Parallel Reward Integration with Symmetry for MORL
About
This work studies heterogeneous Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL), where objectives can differ sharply in temporal frequency. Such heterogeneity allows dense objectives to dominate learning, while sparse long-horizon rewards receive weak credit assignment, leading to poor sample efficiency. We propose a Parallel Reward Integration with Symmetry (PRISM) algorithm that enforces reflectional symmetry as an inductive bias in aligning reward channels. PRISM introduces ReSymNet, a theory-motivated model that reconciles temporal-frequency mismatches across objectives, using residual blocks to learn a scaled opportunity value that accelerates exploration while preserving the optimal policy. We also propose SymReg, a reflectional equivariance regulariser that enforces agent mirroring and constrains policy search to a reflection-equivariant subspace. This restriction provably reduces hypothesis complexity and improves generalisation. Across MuJoCo benchmarks, PRISM consistently outperforms both a sparse-reward baseline and an oracle trained with full dense rewards, improving Pareto coverage and distributional balance: it achieves hypervolume gains exceeding 100\% over the baseline and up to 32\% over the oracle. The code is at \href{https://github.com/EVIEHub/PRISM}{https://github.com/EVIEHub/PRISM}.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning | mo-hopper v5 | Hypervolume (x10^7)1.58e+7 | 3 | |
| Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning | mo-walker2d v5 | Hypervolume (HV)4.77e+4 | 3 | |
| Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning | mo-halfcheetah v5 | HV (x10^4)2.25e+4 | 3 | |
| Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning | mo-swimmer v5 | Hypervolume (HV)1.21e+4 | 3 |