A Single Deep Preference-Conditioned Policy for Learning Pareto Coverage Sets
For researchers in multi-objective reinforcement learning, this work provides theoretical foundations for preference-conditioned policies and a practical algorithm that outperforms existing methods.
This paper proves that under smooth Tchebycheff scalarization in tabular multi-objective MDPs, each preference yields a unique Pareto-optimal return vector that depends Lipschitz-continuously on the preference, and proposes CMDPI with an O(1/k) convergence rate. The deep actor-critic variant achieves the best average hypervolume rank among baselines on eight MO-Gymnasium tasks.
Preference-conditioned multi-objective reinforcement learning aims to learn a single policy that captures trade-offs across preferences, but under nonlinear scalarization the uniqueness and continuity of the preference-to-solution correspondence remain unclear. We study this problem in tabular multi-objective Markov decision processes (MDPs) using smooth Tchebycheff scalarization as a monotone utility. Under mild interior conditions on the preference set, we prove that each preference induces a unique Pareto-optimal return vector and that this vector depends Lipschitz-continuously on the preference, providing a principled foundation for preference sweeping toward dense Pareto-front coverage. To compute these targets, we formulate the problem over occupancy measures and derive Concave Mirror Descent Policy Iteration (CMDPI), which achieves an $O(1/k)$ objective-suboptimality rate. We further show that each update is equivalent to solving a Kullback-Leibler-regularized MDP with the previous policy as reference, yielding a policy-iteration interpretation and finite-iterate policy continuity across preferences. We instantiate the update as a deep actor-critic algorithm preserving previous-policy regularization. On eight MO-Gymnasium tasks, it achieves the best average hypervolume rank among recent baselines and strong expected-utility performance. Continuous-control experiments indicate gains beyond the discrete-action setting.