# ProgressVLA: Progress-Guided Diffusion Policy for Vision-Language Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27670 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27670/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Efficient VLA inference and adaptation, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 40 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [Efficient VLA inference and adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/vla/efficient-vla-inference-and-adaptation/)
- 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 40)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19645/) (2025)
- [DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12945/) (2024)
- [FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09747/) (2025)
- [UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06111/) (2025)
- [AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06669/) (2025)
- [Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13139/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Foundation Models as Effective Robot Imitators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01378/) (2023)
- [Latent Action Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11758/) (2024)
- [π*0.6: a VLA That Learns From Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14759/) (2025)
- [3D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10885/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation with Pretrained Image-Editing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10639/) (2023)
- [Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13030/) (2025)
- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02908/) (2020)
- [VLA-Adapter: An Effective Paradigm for Tiny-Scale Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09372/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Diffusion Transformer: Learning Versatile Behavior from Multimodal Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05996/) (2024)
- [ReconVLA: Reconstructive Vision-Language-Action Model as Effective Robot Perceiver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10333/) (2025)
- [Dita: Scaling Diffusion Transformer for Generalist Vision-Language-Action Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19757/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models: Concepts, Progress, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04769/) (2025)
- [RynnVLA-002: A Unified Vision-Language-Action and World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17502/) (2025)
- [IGOR: Image-GOal Representations are the Atomic Control Units for Foundation Models in Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00785/) (2024)
- [WMPO: World Model-based Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09515/) (2025)
- [Moto: Latent Motion Token as the Bridging Language for Learning Robot Manipulation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04445/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16732/) (2025)
- [villa-X: Enhancing Latent Action Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23682/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Feedback World Model Enables Precise Guidance of Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15705/) (2026)
- [Back to the Familiar Future: Failure Recovery for VLA Policies via Pre-Imagined Milestone Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09258/) (2026)
- [Progress Reward Modeling for Robotic Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21655/) (2026)
- [Rethink Before You Execute: Adaptive Execution for World Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09492/) (2026)
- [PAMAE: Phase-Aware-MoE Action Experts Towards Reliable Flow-Matching Vision-Language-Action Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27144/) (2026)
- [DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22067/) (2026)
- [CASD: Chunk-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Multi-StageRobot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08638/) (2026)
- [CARF: Contrastive Attraction-Repulsion of Failure-Guided Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21982/) (2026)
- [PF-RL: Progress Field Reinforcement Learning via Goal-Conditioned Value Geometry for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32634/) (2026)
- [ForeAct3D: Policy-Grounded Future World Modeling for VLA Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing vision-language-action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation lack progress awareness, typically relying on hand-crafted heuristics for task termination. This limitation is particularly severe in long-horizon tasks involving cascaded sub-goals. In this work, we investigate the estimation and integration of task progress, proposing a novel model named textbf vla. Our technical contributions are twofold: (1) robust progress estimation: We pre-train a progress estimator on large-scale, unsupervised video-text robotic datasets. This estimator achieves a low prediction residual (0.07 on a scale of [0, 1]) in simulation and demonstrates zero-shot generalization to unseen real-world samples, and (2) differentiable progress guidance: We introduce an inverse dynamics world model that maps predicted action tokens into future latent visual states. These latents are then processed by the progress estimator; by applying a maximal progress regularization, we establish a differentiable pipeline that provides progress-piloted guidance to refine action tokens. Extensive experiments on the CALVIN and LIBERO benchmarks, alongside real-world robot deployment, consistently demonstrate substantial improvements in success rates and generalization over strong baselines.