Dongliang Chen
2026
APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation
Dongliang Chen | Xinlin Zhuang | Junjie Xu | Luojian Xie | Zehui Wang | Jiaxi Zhuang | Haolin Yang | Liang Dou | Xiao He | Xingjiao Wu | Ying Qian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Dongliang Chen | Xinlin Zhuang | Junjie Xu | Luojian Xie | Zehui Wang | Jiaxi Zhuang | Haolin Yang | Liang Dou | Xiao He | Xingjiao Wu | Ying Qian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
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 𝒫3 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.