GraphAllocBench: A Flexible Benchmark for Preference-Conditioned Multi-Objective Policy Learning

Ellen Novoseller, Yunzhe Wang, Volkan Ustun, Zhiheng Jiang, Ryan Marr, Benjamin Files

arXiv · PDF · Open in the Atlas

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• jzh001/GraphAllocBench

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Abstract

Preference-Conditioned Policy Learning (PCPL) in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) approximates diverse Pareto-optimal solutions by conditioning a single policy on user-specified preferences, enabling run-time adaptation to arbitrary trade-offs without retraining. However, existing PCPL benchmarks are largely restricted to toy tasks and fixed environments, limiting their realism and scalability. To address this gap, we introduce GraphAllocBench, a flexible benchmark built on CityPlannerEnv, a novel graph-based resource allocation sandbox inspired by city management. GraphAllocBench provides a rich suite of problems with customizable objective functions, varying preference conditions, complex Pareto Fronts, and high-dimensional scalability. We further propose two supplementary metrics -Proportion of Non-Dominated Solutions (PNDS) and Ordering Score (OS) -that capture prediction reliability and preference consistency while complementing the widely used hypervolume metric. Through experiments with several state-ofthe-art PCPL algorithms and our own MLP and graph-aware PCPL-PPO baseline, we show that GraphAllocBench exposes distinct failure modes that hypervolume alone does not capture but our supplementary metrics reveal, while motivating graph-based approaches such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for scaling to complex, highdimensional allocation tasks. By letting users freely vary objectives, preferences, and allocation rules, GraphAllocBench serves as a versatile and extensible testbed for advancing PCPL. Code: https://github.com/jzh001/GraphAllocBench

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