# Consistency Policy: Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Consistency Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07503 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07503/

## Key facts

- Cited by 166 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 30 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05782/) (2023)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [Implicit Behavioral Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00137/) (2021)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14189/) (2023)
- [InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06380/) (2023)
- [Relay Policy Learning: Solving Long-Horizon Tasks via Imitation and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11956/) (2019)
- [Vision-Language Foundation Models as Effective Robot Imitators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01378/) (2023)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11251/) (2022)
- [Perception Prioritized Training of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00227/) (2022)
- [Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10677/) (2023)
- [Efficient Diffusion Training via Min-SNR Weighting Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09556/) (2023)
- [Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning using Score-based Diffusion Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02532/) (2023)
- [MM-Diffusion: Learning Multi-Modal Diffusion Models for Joint Audio and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09478/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models for Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07226/) (2023)
- [3D Diffusion Policy: Generalizable Visuomotor Policy Learning via Simple 3D Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03954/) (2024)
- [Consistency Models as a Rich and Efficient Policy Class for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16984/) (2023)
- [Boosting Continuous Control with Consistency Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06343/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 166)

- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07339/) (2025)
- [DexVLA: Vision-Language Model with Plug-In Diffusion Expert for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05855/) (2025)
- [HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10631/) (2025)
- [ConRFT: A Reinforced Fine-tuning Method for VLA Models via Consistency Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05450/) (2025)
- [ChatVLA: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Robot Control with Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14420/) (2025)
- [FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04987/) (2024)
- [One-Step Diffusion Policy: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21257/) (2024)
- [PD-VLA: Accelerating Vision-Language-Action Model Integrated with Action Chunking via Parallel Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02310/) (2025)
- [Towards Synergistic, Generalized, and Efficient Dual-System for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08001/) (2024)
- [The Ingredients for Robotic Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10088/) (2024)
- [ManiCM: Real-time 3D Diffusion Policy via Consistency Model for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01586/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-VLA: Generalizable and Interpretable Robot Foundation Model via Self-Generated Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03293/) (2024)
- [Streaming Diffusion Policy: Fast Policy Synthesis with Variable Noise Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04806/) (2024)
- [Affordance-based Robot Manipulation with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01083/) (2024)
- [Bidirectional Decoding: Improving Action Chunking via Guided Test-Time Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17355/) (2024)
- [NavDP: Learning Sim-to-Real Navigation Diffusion Policy with Privileged Information Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08712/) (2025)
- [ChatVLA-2: Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Embodied Reasoning from Pretrained Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21906/) (2025)
- [ManiFlow: A General Robot Manipulation Policy via Consistency Flow Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01819/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08438/) (2025)
- [Scaling Diffusion Policy in Transformer to 1 Billion Parameters for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14411/) (2024)
- [CEED-VLA: Consistency Vision-Language-Action Model with Early-Exit Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13725/) (2025)
- [Much Ado About Noising: Dispelling the Myths of Generative Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01809/) (2025)
- [Deep Generative Models in Robotics: A Survey on Learning from Multimodal Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04380/) (2024)
- [ARCap: Collecting High-quality Human Demonstrations for Robot Learning with Augmented Reality Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08464/) (2024)
- [RDT2: Exploring the Scaling Limit of UMI Data Towards Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03310/) (2026)
- [CARP: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06782/) (2024)
- [MMInference: Accelerating Pre-filling for Long-Context VLMs via Modality-Aware Permutation Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16083/) (2025)
- [TidyBot++: An Open-Source Holonomic Mobile Manipulator for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10447/) (2024)
- [One-Step Flow Policy Mirror Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23675/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many robotic systems, such as mobile manipulators or quadrotors, cannot be equipped with high-end GPUs due to space, weight, and power constraints. These constraints prevent these systems from leveraging recent developments in visuomotor policy architectures that require high-end GPUs to achieve fast policy inference. In this paper, we propose Consistency Policy, a faster and similarly powerful alternative to Diffusion Policy for learning visuomotor robot control. By virtue of its fast inference speed, Consistency Policy can enable low latency decision making in resource-constrained robotic setups. A Consistency Policy is distilled from a pretrained Diffusion Policy by enforcing self-consistency along the Diffusion Policy's learned trajectories. We compare Consistency Policy with Diffusion Policy and other related speed-up methods across 6 simulation tasks as well as three real-world tasks where we demonstrate inference on a laptop GPU. For all these tasks, Consistency Policy speeds up inference by an order of magnitude compared to the fastest alternative method and maintains competitive success rates. We also show that the Conistency Policy training procedure is robust to the pretrained Diffusion Policy's quality, a useful result that helps practioners avoid extensive testing of the pretrained model. Key design decisions that enabled this performance are the choice of consistency objective, reduced initial sample variance, and the choice of preset chaining steps.