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Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2027

GEOMA: Geometric and Econometric Objectives for Multi-Reward Alignment

Abstract

Alignment of large language models is increasingly formulated as optimization over multiple rubric signals. These signals typically exhibit strong statistical dependencies, ranging from redundancy to anti-correlation (e.g., conciseness versus correctness), raising the question of how to robustly convert vector-valued rewards into scalar advantages. While recent state-of-the-art methods like GDPO address scale discrepancies via per-dimension normalization, they ignore reward geometry by treating coordinates as orthogonal. This mishandles correlations: redundant objectives are double-counted, while anti-correlated rewards are dominated by high-variance trade-off directions. We introduce GEOMA (Geometric and Econometric Objectives for Multi-reward Alignment), a framework that decomposes reward aggregation into geometric preconditioning via covariance sphering of reward vectors, and econometric aggregation such as Nash Welfare and SoftMin. We formally characterize these objectives, providing theoretical guarantees for their robustness to reward hacking and signal redundancy. Empirically, we demonstrate that GEOMA outperforms GDPO on Math reasoning and Tool Calling. It further improves alignment on AlpacaEval as a test-time re-ranking strategy.

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