Progress Reward Modeling for Robotic Learning

September 8, 2026 · View on GitHub

Progress Reward Modeling for Robotic Learning

(Still Actively Updating🔥) A survey-aligned map of how robots can tell whether they are moving forward, standing still, or undoing progress.

Awesome HuggingFace arXiv GitHub GitHub stars License: MIT

A terminal success label only says whether the task finished. A progress model asks the harder question during execution: is the robot advancing, stagnating, or regressing under the current goal?

Survey map · Paper gallery · Citation · Contribute

Evolution of progress reward modeling from 2017 to 2026

Survey at a Glance

The paper follows one continuous path from definition to evidence. The README mirrors that path so every section can be traced back to the source.

Survey layerQuestionOrganization used in the paper
1 · InterfaceWhat does the model receive and return?current-state representation · task-goal specification · output form
2 · MethodsWhere does the progress signal come from?frozen foundation models · temporal/relative supervision · instruction tuning · programmatic rewards
3 · Data & benchmarksHow is supervision produced, and what does evaluation prove?human-driven · human-in-the-loop · automated; fidelity · robustness/generalization · downstream utility
4 · LimitationsWhat still breaks in realistic use?weak temporal assumptions · partial observability · calibration/generalization · closed-loop reliability

Quick Navigation

SectionWhat to look for
InterfaceThe exact input/output design space from the survey.
Construction paradigmsThe four method families used in the paper.
Paper GalleryPapers with venue, previews, code/project links, and BibTeX.
Data & Benchmark LensHow labels are built and what each evaluation actually validates.
LimitationsThe paper's deployment-relevant open problems.

Interface

Interface taxonomy of progress models

Design axisChoices in the paperCore trade-off
Current task statesingle observation · temporal context · relational comparison · state/API accessMore context resolves ambiguity, but increases latency and weakens online usability.
Task goallanguage · goal image or demonstration · structured/programmatic goalRicher grounding reduces ambiguity, but needs more curation or privileged state.
Model outputstate-wise score · progress delta · ranking · executable reward functionThe output determines whether the model naturally fits monitoring, comparison, planning, or RL.

Construction Paradigms

Four paradigms for constructing progress rewards

ParadigmSignal sourceStrengthMain caveat
Frozen foundation-model scoringimage-text similarity, token probability, in-context value judgmentzero-shot usesemantic prior is not automatically a calibrated reward
Temporal / relative supervisiondemonstration order, proximity, preferences, rankingsscalable weak supervisiontime is not always progress; comparisons still need scalarization
Instruction-tuned progress predictionexplicit progress, success, delta, preference, or reasoning targetsdedicated progress capabilityrequires well-grounded targets and coverage of failures/regressions
Programmatic reward constructiongenerated code, predicates, features, APIsinterpretable and editableonly as faithful as the available state and task decomposition
DatePaperVenue / StatusResourcesPrimary Category
2026/08Robo-Dopamine 2.0: History-Conditioned and OOD-Aware Process Reward Modeling for Robotic Manipulation
PreviewRobo-Dopamine 2.0: History-Conditioned and OOD-Aware Process Reward Modeling for Robotic Manipulation overview
arXiv
BibTeX
@article{xu2026robodopamine2,
title={Robo-Dopamine 2.0: History-Conditioned and OOD-Aware Process Reward Modeling for Robotic Manipulation},
author={Xu, Yijie and Jin, Haopeng and Zhou, Run and Liu, Shengbang and Chen, Sixiang and Cheng, Hongyang and Hu, Sicheng and Co, Peterson and Luo, Jinwen and Tan, Huajie and Zhang, Shanghang},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.15680},
year={2026}
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/07DenseReward: Dense Reward Learning via Failure Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation
PreviewDenseReward: Dense Reward Learning via Failure Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation overview
arXivProject
BibTeX
@article{fang2026densereward,
title={DenseReward: Dense Reward Learning via Failure Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation},
author={Fang, Yu and Dong, Wanxi and Liu, Jiaqi and Yang, Yue and Huo, Mingxiao and Mu, Yao and Yao, Huaxiu and Li, Li Erran and Szafir, Daniel and Ding, Mingyu},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13033},
year={2026}
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/07UR-VC: Unsupervised Robotic Value Correction for Time-Derived Progress Proxies
PreviewUR-VC: Unsupervised Robotic Value Correction for Time-Derived Progress Proxies overview
arXivProject
BibTeX
@misc{zhao2026urvc,
title={UR-VC: Unsupervised Robotic Value Correction for Time-Derived Progress Proxies},
author={Zhao, Lirui and Shi, Modi and Chen, Li and Liu, Qi and Luo, Ping and Li, Hongyang},
year={2026},
eprint={2607.12892},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12892},
}
Temporal / relative
2026/06STEAM: Self-Supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling for Real-World Robot Learning
PreviewSTEAM: Self-Supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling for Real-World Robot Learning overview
arXivProject
BibTeX
@article{liu2026steam,
title={STEAM: Self-Supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling for Real-World Robot Learning},
author={Liu, Zhihao and Gu, Qiuyi and Wang, Yitao and Qiao, Dongming and Zhang, Yixian and Chen, Shuaihang and Shi, Liangzhi and Zhou, Tianxing and Huang, Zefang and Chen, Kang and Guo, Zhen and Zhang, Quanlu and Yu, Jincheng and Liang, Xiaodan and Fan, Guoliang and Wang, Yu and Gao, Feng and Chen, Xinlei and Yu, Chao},
year={2026},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.29834}
}
Temporal / relative
2026/06SARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulation
PreviewSARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulation overview
arXivCode · Project
BibTeX
@article{chen2026sarm2,
title={SARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulation},
author={Chen, Qianzhong and Zheng, Hau and Yu, Justin and Huang, Suning and Sun, Jiankai and Goldberg, Ken and Wen, Chuan and Abbeel, Pieter and Shentu, Yide and Wu, Philipp and Schwager, Mac},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.10305},
year={2026}
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/05Hide-and-Seek in Trajectories: Discovering Failure Signals for VLA Runtime Monitoring
PreviewHide-and-Seek in Trajectories: Discovering Failure Signals for VLA Runtime Monitoring overview
ICML 2026 FAGEN WorkshopProject
BibTeX
@article{park2026hide,
title={Hide-and-Seek in Trajectories: Discovering Failure Signals for VLA Runtime Monitoring},
author={Park, Seongheon and Li, Wendi and Oh, Changdae and Yeh, Samuel and Kira, Zsolt and Hagenow, Michael and Li, Sharon},
year={2026},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30834}
}
Temporal / relative
2026/04ARM: Advantage Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Manipulation
PreviewARM: Advantage Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Manipulation overview
CVPR 2026 GigaBrain Challenge Workshop
BibTeX
@misc{mao2026armadvantagerewardmodeling,
title={ARM: Advantage Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Manipulation},
author={Yiming Mao and Zixi Yu and Weixin Mao and Yinhao Li and Qirui Hu and Zihan Lan and Minzhao Zhu and Hua Chen},
year={2026},
eprint={2604.03037},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03037},
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/03Generalizable Dense Reward for Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks
PreviewGeneralizable Dense Reward for Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks overview
IROS 2026 (accepted)
BibTeX
@misc{yong2026generalizabledenserewardlonghorizon,
title={Generalizable Dense Reward for Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks},
author={Silong Yong and Stephen Sheng and Carl Qi and Xiaojie Wang and Evan Sheehan and Anurag Shivaprasad and Yaqi Xie and Katia Sycara and Yesh Dattatreya},
year={2026},
eprint={2604.00055},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00055},
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/03ProgressVLA: Progress-Guided Diffusion Policy for Vision-Language Robotic ManipulationarXiv
BibTeX
@misc{yan2026progressvlaprogressguideddiffusionpolicy,
title={ProgressVLA: Progress-Guided Diffusion Policy for Vision-Language Robotic Manipulation},
author={Hongyu Yan and Qiwei Li and Jiaolong Yang and Yadong Mu},
year={2026},
eprint={2603.27670},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27670},
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/03Recurrent Reasoning with Vision-Language Models for Estimating Long-Horizon Embodied Task ProgressCVPR 2026Code
BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026recurrentreasoningvisionlanguagemodels,
title={Recurrent Reasoning with Vision-Language Models for Estimating Long-Horizon Embodied Task Progress},
author={Yuelin Zhang and Sijie Cheng and Chen Li and Zongzhao Li and Yuxin Huang and Yang Liu and Wenbing Huang},
year={2026},
eprint={2603.17312},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17312},
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/03Robometer: Scaling General-Purpose Robotic Reward Models via Trajectory Comparisons
PreviewRobometer: Scaling General-Purpose Robotic Reward Models via Trajectory Comparisons overview
RSS 2026Code
BibTeX
@misc{liang2026robometerscalinggeneralpurposerobotic,
title={Robometer: Scaling General-Purpose Robotic Reward Models via Trajectory Comparisons},
author={Anthony Liang and Yigit Korkmaz and Jiahui Zhang and Minyoung Hwang and Abrar Anwar and Sidhant Kaushik and Aditya Shah and Alex S. Huang and Luke Zettlemoyer and Dieter Fox and Yu Xiang and Anqi Li and Andreea Bobu and Abhishek Gupta and Stephen Tu and Erdem Biyik and Jesse Zhang},
year={2026},
eprint={2603.02115},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02115},
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/02TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics
PreviewTOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics overview
CoRL 2026 (accepted)Code
BibTeX
@misc{chen2026toprewardtokenprobabilitieshidden,
title={TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics},
author={Shirui Chen and Cole Harrison and Ying-Chun Lee and Angela Jin Yang and Zhongzheng Ren and Lillian J. Ratliff and Jiafei Duan and Dieter Fox and Ranjay Krishna},
year={2026},
eprint={2602.19313},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19313},
}
Frozen FM
2026/01PROGRESSLM: Towards Progress Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
PreviewPROGRESSLM: Towards Progress Reasoning in Vision-Language Models overview
ACL 2026Code
BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026progresslmprogressreasoningvisionlanguage,
title={PROGRESSLM: Towards Progress Reasoning in Vision-Language Models},
author={Jianshu Zhang and Chengxuan Qian and Haosen Sun and Haoran Lu and Dingcheng Wang and Letian Xue and Han Liu},
year={2026},
eprint={2601.15224},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15224},
}
Instruction-tuned
2026/01RoboReward: General-Purpose Vision-Language Reward Models for Robotics
PreviewRoboReward: General-Purpose Vision-Language Reward Models for Robotics overview
arXivProject
BibTeX
@misc{lee2026roborewardgeneralpurposevisionlanguagereward,
title={RoboReward: General-Purpose Vision-Language Reward Models for Robotics},
author={Tony Lee and Andrew Wagenmaker and Karl Pertsch and Percy Liang and Sergey Levine and Chelsea Finn},
year={2026},
eprint={2601.00675},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00675},
}
Instruction-tuned
2025/12Robo-Dopamine: General Process Reward Modeling for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation
PreviewRobo-Dopamine: General Process Reward Modeling for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation overview
CVPR 2026Code
BibTeX
@article{tan2025robo,
title={Robo-Dopamine: General Process Reward Modeling for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation},
author={Tan, Huajie and Chen, Sixiang and Xu, Yijie and Wang, Zixiao and Ji, Yuheng and Chi, Cheng and Lyu, Yaoxu and Zhao, Zhongxia and Chen, Xiansheng and Co, Peterson and Xie, Shaoxuan and Yao, Guocai and Wang, Pengwei and Wang, Zhongyuan and Zhang, Shanghang},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.23703},
year={2025}
}
Instruction-tuned
2025/11SRPO: Self-Referential Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models
PreviewSRPO: Self-Referential Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models overview
CVPR 2026Code
BibTeX
@misc{fei2025srposelfreferentialpolicyoptimization,
title={SRPO: Self-Referential Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models},
author={Senyu Fei and Siyin Wang and Li Ji and Ao Li and Shiduo Zhang and Liming Liu and Jinlong Hou and Jingjing Gong and Xianzhong Zhao and Xipeng Qiu},
year={2025},
eprint={2511.15605},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15605},
}
Temporal / relative
2025/09SARM: Stage-Aware Reward Modeling for Long Horizon Robot Manipulation
PreviewSARM: Stage-Aware Reward Modeling for Long Horizon Robot Manipulation overview
ICLR 2026Code
BibTeX
@misc{chen2025sarmstageawarerewardmodeling,
title={SARM: Stage-Aware Reward Modeling for Long Horizon Robot Manipulation},
author={Qianzhong Chen and Justin Yu and Mac Schwager and Pieter Abbeel and Yide Shentu and Philipp Wu},
year={2025},
eprint={2509.25358},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25358},
}
Instruction-tuned
2025/09OpenGVL -- Benchmarking Visual Temporal Progress for Data Curation
PreviewOpenGVL -- Benchmarking Visual Temporal Progress for Data Curation overview
NeurIPS 2025 EWM Workshop
CoRL 2025 Data Workshop
Code
BibTeX
@article{budzianowski2025opengvl,
title={OpenGVL -- Benchmarking Visual Temporal Progress for Data Curation},
author={Budzianowski, Pawe{\l} and Wi{'s}nios, Emilia and Tyrolski, Micha{\l} and G{'o}ral, Gracjan and Kulakov, Igor and Petrenko, Viktor and Walas, Krzysztof},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.17321},
year={2025}
}
Frozen FM
2025/09A Vision-Language-Action-Critic Model for Robotic Real-World Reinforcement Learning (VLAC)
PreviewA Vision-Language-Action-Critic Model for Robotic Real-World Reinforcement Learning (VLAC) overview
arXivCode
BibTeX
@article{zhai2025vision,
title={A Vision-Language-Action-Critic Model for Robotic Real-World Reinforcement Learning},
author={Zhai, Shaopeng and Zhang, Qi and Zhang, Tianyi and Huang, Fuxian and Zhang, Haoran and Zhou, Ming and Zhang, Shengzhe and Liu, Litao and Lin, Sixu and Pang, Jiangmiao},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.15937},
year={2025}
}
Instruction-tuned
2025/05ReWiND: Language-Guided Rewards Teach Robot Policies without New Demonstrations
PreviewReWiND: Language-Guided Rewards Teach Robot Policies without New Demonstrations overview
CoRL 2025 (Oral)Code
BibTeX
@misc{zhang2025rewindlanguageguidedrewardsteach,
title={ReWiND: Language-Guided Rewards Teach Robot Policies without New Demonstrations},
author={Jiahui Zhang and Yusen Luo and Abrar Anwar and Sumedh Anand Sontakke and Joseph J Lim and Jesse Thomason and Erdem Biyik and Jesse Zhang},
year={2025},
eprint={2505.10911},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10911},
}
Instruction-tuned
2025/02Subtask-Aware Visual Reward Learning from Segmented Demonstrations
PreviewSubtask-Aware Visual Reward Learning from Segmented Demonstrations overview
ICLR 2025Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kim2025subtask,
title={Subtask-Aware Visual Reward Learning from Segmented Demonstrations},
author={Kim, Changyeon and Heo, Minho and Lee, Doohyun and Lee, Honglak and Shin, Jinwoo and Lim, Joseph J. and Lee, Kimin},
booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=mqKVe6F3Up}
}
Instruction-tuned
2024/11ELEMENTAL: Interactive Learning from Demonstrations and Vision-Language Models for Reward Design in Robotics
PreviewELEMENTAL: Interactive Learning from Demonstrations and Vision-Language Models for Reward Design in Robotics overview
ICML 2025
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v267-chen25at,
title={{ELEMENTAL}: Interactive Learning from Demonstrations and Vision-Language Models for Reward Design in Robotics},
author={Chen, Letian and Moorman, Nina Marie and Gombolay, Matthew Craig},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages={8700--8725},
year={2025},
volume={267},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/chen25at.html}
}
Programmatic
2024/11Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners
PreviewVision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners overview
ICLR 2025
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ma2025vision,
title={Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners},
author={Ma, Yecheng Jason and Hejna, Joey and Wahid, Ayzaan and Fu, Chuyuan and Shah, Dhruv and Liang, Jacky and Xu, Zhuo and Kirmani, Sean and Xu, Peng and Driess, Danny and Xiao, Ted and Tompson, Jonathan and Bastani, Osbert and Jayaraman, Dinesh and Yu, Wenhao and Zhang, Tingnan and Sadigh, Dorsa and Xia, Fei},
booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=friHAl5ofG}
}
Frozen FM
2024/10On-Robot Reinforcement Learning with Goal-Contrastive Rewards
PreviewOn-Robot Reinforcement Learning with Goal-Contrastive Rewards overview
ICRA 2025Project
BibTeX
@misc{biza2025onrobotreinforcementlearninggoalcontrastive,
title={On-Robot Reinforcement Learning with Goal-Contrastive Rewards},
author={Ondrej Biza and Thomas Weng and Lingfeng Sun and Karl Schmeckpeper and Tarik Kelestemur and Yecheng Jason Ma and Robert Platt and Jan-Willem van de Meent and Lawson L. S. Wong},
year={2025},
eprint={2410.19989},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19989},
}
Temporal / relative
2024/05Video-Language Critic: Transferable Reward Functions for Language-Conditioned Robotics
PreviewVideo-Language Critic: Transferable Reward Functions for Language-Conditioned Robotics overview
TMLR 2025Code
BibTeX
@misc{alakuijala2025videolanguagecritictransferablereward,
title={Video-Language Critic: Transferable Reward Functions for Language-Conditioned Robotics},
author={Minttu Alakuijala and Reginald McLean and Isaac Woungang and Nariman Farsad and Samuel Kaski and Pekka Marttinen and Kai Yuan},
year={2025},
eprint={2405.19988},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19988},
}
Temporal / relative
2024/05VICtoR: Learning Hierarchical Vision-Instruction Correlation Rewards for Long-horizon Manipulation
PreviewVICtoR: Learning Hierarchical Vision-Instruction Correlation Rewards for Long-horizon Manipulation overview
ICLR 2025Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{hung2025victor,
title={VICtoR: Learning Hierarchical Vision-Instruction Correlation Rewards for Long-horizon Manipulation},
author={Hung, Kuo-Han and Lo, Pang-Chi and Yeh, Jia-Fong and Hsu, Han-Yuan and Chen, Yi-Ting and Hsu, Winston H.},
booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=UpQLu9bzAR}
}
Instruction-tuned
2024/04Rank2Reward: Learning Shaped Reward Functions from Passive Video
PreviewRank2Reward: Learning Shaped Reward Functions from Passive Video overview
ICRA 2024Code
BibTeX
@misc{yang2024rank2rewardlearningshapedreward,
title={Rank2Reward: Learning Shaped Reward Functions from Passive Video},
author={Daniel Yang and Davin Tjia and Jacob Berg and Dima Damen and Pulkit Agrawal and Abhishek Gupta},
year={2024},
eprint={2404.14735},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14735},
}
Temporal / relative
2024/02Code as Reward: Empowering Reinforcement Learning with VLMs
PreviewCode as Reward: Empowering Reinforcement Learning with VLMs overview
ICML 2024Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{venuto2024code,
title={Code as Reward: Empowering Reinforcement Learning with VLMs},
author={Venuto, David and Islam, Mohammad Sami Nur and Klissarov, Martin and Precup, Doina and Yang, Sherry and Anand, Ankit},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2024}
}
Programmatic
2024/02Task Success is not Enough: Investigating the Use of Video-Language Models as Behavior Critics for Catching Undesirable Agent Behaviors
PreviewTask Success is not Enough: Investigating the Use of Video-Language Models as Behavior Critics for Catching Undesirable Agent Behaviors overview
COLM 2024Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{guan2024tasksuccess,
title={{Task Success} is not Enough: Investigating the Use of Video-Language Models as Behavior Critics for Catching Undesirable Agent Behaviors},
author={Guan, Lin and Zhou, Yifan and Liu, Denis and Zha, Yantian and Ben Amor, Heni and Kambhampati, Subbarao},
booktitle={First Conference on Language Modeling},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=otKo4zFKmH}
}
Frozen FM
2024/02RL-VLM-F: Reinforcement Learning from Vision Language Foundation Model Feedback
PreviewRL-VLM-F: Reinforcement Learning from Vision Language Foundation Model Feedback overview
ICML 2024Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{wang2024rlvlmf,
title={RL-VLM-F: Reinforcement Learning from Vision Language Foundation Model Feedback},
author={Wang, Yufei and Sun, Zhanyi and Zhang, Jesse and Xian, Zhou and Biyik, Erdem and Held, David and Erickson, Zackory},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages={51484--51501},
year={2024},
volume={235},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/wang24bn.html}
}
Temporal / relative
2023/12Vision-Language Models as a Source of Rewards
PreviewVision-Language Models as a Source of Rewards overview
NeurIPS 2023 ALOE Workshop
BibTeX
@article{baumli2023visionlanguage,
title={Vision-Language Models as a Source of Rewards},
author={Baumli, Kate and Baveja, Satinder and Behbahani, Feryal and Chan, Harris and Comanici, Gheorghe and Flennerhag, Sebastian and Gazeau, Maxime and Holsheimer, Kristian and Horgan, Dan and Laskin, Michael and Lyle, Clare and Masoom, Hussain and McKinney, Kay and Mnih, Volodymyr and Neitz, Alexander and Nikulin, Dmitry and Pardo, Fabio and Parker-Holder, Jack and Quan, John and Rockt{"a}schel, Tim and Sahni, Himanshu and Schaul, Tom and Schroecker, Yannick and Spencer, Stephen and Steigerwald, Richie and Wang, Luyu and Zhang, Lei},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.09187},
year={2023}
}
Frozen FM
2023/10Robot Fine-Tuning Made Easy: Pre-Training Rewards and Policies for Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning
PreviewRobot Fine-Tuning Made Easy: Pre-Training Rewards and Policies for Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning overview
ICRA 2024Project
BibTeX
@misc{yang2023robotfinetuningeasypretraining,
title={Robot Fine-Tuning Made Easy: Pre-Training Rewards and Policies for Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning},
author={Jingyun Yang and Max Sobol Mark and Brandon Vu and Archit Sharma and Jeannette Bohg and Chelsea Finn},
year={2023},
eprint={2310.15145},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15145},
}
Temporal / relative
2023/10Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Models
PreviewEureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Models overview
ICLR 2024Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ma2024eureka,
title={Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Models},
author={Ma, Yecheng Jason and Liang, William and Wang, Guanzhi and Huang, De-An and Bastani, Osbert and Jayaraman, Dinesh and Zhu, Yuke and Fan, Linxi and Anandkumar, Anima},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=IEduRUO55F}
}
Programmatic
2023/10Vision-Language Models are Zero-Shot Reward Models for Reinforcement Learning
PreviewVision-Language Models are Zero-Shot Reward Models for Reinforcement Learning overview
ICLR 2024Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{rocamonde2024visionlanguage,
title={Vision-Language Models are Zero-Shot Reward Models for Reinforcement Learning},
author={Rocamonde, Juan and Montesinos, Victoriano and Nava, Elvis and Perez, Ethan and Lindner, David},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=N0I2RtD8je}
}
Frozen FM
2023/09Robotic Offline RL from Internet Videos via Value-Function Pre-Training
PreviewRobotic Offline RL from Internet Videos via Value-Function Pre-Training overview
ICRA 2024
BibTeX
@misc{bhateja2023roboticofflinerlinternet,
title={Robotic Offline RL from Internet Videos via Value-Function Pre-Training},
author={Chethan Bhateja and Derek Guo and Dibya Ghosh and Anikait Singh and Manan Tomar and Quan Vuong and Yevgen Chebotar and Sergey Levine and Aviral Kumar},
year={2023},
eprint={2309.13041},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.13041},
}
Temporal / relative
2023/09Text2Reward: Reward Shaping with Language Models for Reinforcement Learning
PreviewText2Reward: Reward Shaping with Language Models for Reinforcement Learning overview
ICLR 2024 (Spotlight)Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{xietext2reward,
title={Text2Reward: Reward Shaping with Language Models for Reinforcement Learning},
author={Xie, Tianbao and Zhao, Siheng and Wu, Chen Henry and Liu, Yitao and Luo, Qian and Zhong, Victor and Yang, Yanchao and Yu, Tao},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=tUM39YTRxH}
}
Programmatic
2023/06Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesis
PreviewLanguage to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesis overview
CoRL 2023Code · arXiv
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v229-yu23a,
title={Language to Rewards for Robotic Skill Synthesis},
author={Yu, Wenhao and Gileadi, Nimrod and Fu, Chuyuan and Kirmani, Sean and Lee, Kuang-Huei and Gonzalez Arenas, Montserrat and Chiang, Hao-Tien Lewis and Erez, Tom and Hasenclever, Leonard and Humplik, Jan and Ichter, Brian and Xiao, Ted and Xu, Peng and Zeng, Andy and Zhang, Tingnan and Heess, Nicolas and Sadigh, Dorsa and Tan, Jie and Tassa, Yuval and Xia, Fei},
booktitle={Proceedings of The 7th Conference on Robot Learning},
pages={374--404},
year={2023},
editor={Tan, Jie and Toussaint, Marc and Darvish, Kourosh},
volume={229},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v229/yu23a.html}
}
Programmatic
2023/06PEARL: Zero-Shot Cross-Task Preference Alignment and Robust Reward Learning for Robotic Manipulation
PreviewPEARL: Zero-Shot Cross-Task Preference Alignment and Robust Reward Learning for Robotic Manipulation overview
ICML 2024Project
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v235-liu24o,
title={{PEARL}: Zero-shot Cross-task Preference Alignment and Robust Reward Learning for Robotic Manipulation},
author={Liu, Runze and Du, Yali and Bai, Fengshuo and Lyu, Jiafei and Li, Xiu},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages={30946--30964},
year={2024},
volume={235},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/liu24o.html}
}
Temporal / relative
2023/06LIV: Language-Image Representations and Rewards for Robotic Control
PreviewLIV: Language-Image Representations and Rewards for Robotic Control overview
ICML 2023Code · arXiv
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v202-ma23b,
title={{LIV}: Language-Image Representations and Rewards for Robotic Control},
author={Ma, Yecheng Jason and Kumar, Vikash and Zhang, Amy and Bastani, Osbert and Jayaraman, Dinesh},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages={23301--23320},
year={2023},
volume={202},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/ma23b.html},
}
Temporal / relative
2023/05Video Prediction Models as Rewards for Reinforcement Learning
PreviewVideo Prediction Models as Rewards for Reinforcement Learning overview
NeurIPS 2023Code · arXiv
BibTeX
@inproceedings{NEURIPS2023_d9042abf,
author={Escontrela, Alejandro and Adeniji, Ademi and Yan, Wilson and Jain, Ajay and Peng, Xue Bin and Goldberg, Ken and Lee, Youngwoon and Hafner, Danijar and Abbeel, Pieter},
booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
pages={68760--68783},
publisher={Curran Associates, Inc.},
title={Video Prediction Models as Rewards for Reinforcement Learning},
url={https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/d9042abf40782fbce28901c1c9c0e8d8-Paper-Conference.pdf},
volume={36},
year={2023},
}
Temporal / relative
2023/03Vision-Language Models as Success Detectors
PreviewVision-Language Models as Success Detectors overview
CoLLAs 2023
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v232-du23b,
title={Vision-Language Models as Success Detectors},
author={Du, Yuqing and Konyushkova, Ksenia and Denil, Misha and Raju, Akhil and Landon, Jessica and Hill, Felix and de Freitas, Nando and Cabi, Serkan},
booktitle={Proceedings of The 2nd Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents},
pages={120--136},
year={2023},
editor={Chandar, Sarath and Pascanu, Razvan and Sedghi, Hanie and Precup, Doina},
volume={232},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v232/du23b.html}
}
Frozen FM
2022/09VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training
PreviewVIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training overview
ICLR 2023 (Spotlight)Code
BibTeX
@misc{ma2023vipuniversalvisualreward,
title={VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training},
author={Yecheng Jason Ma and Shagun Sodhani and Dinesh Jayaraman and Osbert Bastani and Vikash Kumar and Amy Zhang},
year={2023},
eprint={2210.00030},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.00030},
}
Temporal / relative
2022/07*Zero-Shot Reward Specification via Grounded Natural Language
PreviewZero-Shot Reward Specification via Grounded Natural Language overview
ICML 2022
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v162-mahmoudieh22a,
title={Zero-Shot Reward Specification via Grounded Natural Language},
author={Mahmoudieh, Parsa and Pathak, Deepak and Darrell, Trevor},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages={14743--14752},
year={2022},
editor={Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Jegelka, Stefanie and Song, Le and Szepesvari, Csaba and Niu, Gang and Sabato, Sivan},
volume={162},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month={17--23 Jul},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/mahmoudieh22a.html}
}
Frozen FM
2022/04Can Foundation Models Perform Zero-Shot Task Specification for Robot Manipulation?
PreviewCan Foundation Models Perform Zero-Shot Task Specification for Robot Manipulation? overview
L4DC 2022Project
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v168-cui22a,
title={Can Foundation Models Perform Zero-Shot Task Specification For Robot Manipulation?},
author={Cui, Yuchen and Niekum, Scott and Gupta, Abhinav and Kumar, Vikash and Rajeswaran, Aravind},
booktitle={Proceedings of The 4th Annual Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference},
pages={893--905},
year={2022},
volume={168},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v168/cui22a.html}
}
Frozen FM
2022/03R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation
PreviewR3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation overview
CoRL 2022Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v205-nair23a,
title={{R3M}: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation},
author={Nair, Suraj and Rajeswaran, Aravind and Kumar, Vikash and Finn, Chelsea and Gupta, Abhinav},
booktitle={Proceedings of The 6th Conference on Robot Learning},
pages={892--909},
year={2023},
editor={Liu, Karen and Kulic, Dana and Ichnowski, Jeff},
volume={205},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v205/nair23a.html},
}
Temporal / relative
2021/12*Generalizable Imitation Learning from Observation via Inferring Goal Proximity
PreviewGeneralizable Imitation Learning from Observation via Inferring Goal Proximity overview
NeurIPS 2021Code
BibTeX
@inproceedings{NEURIPS2021_868b7df9,
author={Lee, Youngwoon and Szot, Andrew and Sun, Shao-Hua and Lim, Joseph J},
booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
pages={16118--16130},
publisher={Curran Associates, Inc.},
title={Generalizable Imitation Learning from Observation via Inferring Goal Proximity},
url={https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/868b7df964b1af24c8c0a9e43a330c6a-Paper.pdf},
volume={34},
year={2021},
}
Temporal / relative
2021/09Learning Language-Conditioned Robot Behavior from Offline Data and Crowd-Sourced Annotation
PreviewLearning Language-Conditioned Robot Behavior from Offline Data and Crowd-Sourced Annotation overview
CoRL 2021Project
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pmlr-v164-nair22a,
title={Learning Language-Conditioned Robot Behavior from Offline Data and Crowd-Sourced Annotation},
author={Nair, Suraj and Mitchell, Eric and Chen, Kevin and ichter, brian and Savarese, Silvio and Finn, Chelsea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Robot Learning},
pages={1303--1315},
year={2022},
volume={164},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v164/nair22a.html}
}
Temporal / relative
2021/03Learning Generalizable Robotic Reward Functions from "In-The-Wild" Human Videos
PreviewLearning Generalizable Robotic Reward Functions from "In-The-Wild" Human Videos overview
RSS 2021Code
BibTeX
@misc{chen2021learninggeneralizableroboticreward,
title={Learning Generalizable Robotic Reward Functions from "In-The-Wild" Human Videos},
author={Annie S. Chen and Suraj Nair and Chelsea Finn},
year={2021},
eprint={2103.16817},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16817},
}
Temporal / relative
2019/09Scaling Data-Driven Robotics with Reward Sketching and Batch Reinforcement Learning
PreviewScaling Data-Driven Robotics with Reward Sketching and Batch Reinforcement Learning overview
RSS 2020Project
BibTeX
@misc{cabi2020scalingdatadrivenroboticsreward,
title={Scaling data-driven robotics with reward sketching and batch reinforcement learning},
author={Serkan Cabi and Sergio G{'o}mez Colmenarejo and Alexander Novikov and Ksenia Konyushkova and Scott Reed and Rae Jeong and Konrad Zolna and Yusuf Aytar and David Budden and Mel Vecerik and Oleg Sushkov and David Barker and Jonathan Scholz and Misha Denil and Nando de Freitas and Ziyu Wang},
year={2020},
eprint={1909.12200},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.RO},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.12200},
}
Temporal / relative
2019/04End-to-End Robotic Reinforcement Learning without Reward Engineering
PreviewEnd-to-End Robotic Reinforcement Learning without Reward Engineering overview
RSS 2019Code
BibTeX
@misc{singh2019endtoendroboticreinforcementlearning,
title={End-to-End Robotic Reinforcement Learning without Reward Engineering},
author={Avi Singh and Larry Yang and Kristian Hartikainen and Chelsea Finn and Sergey Levine},
year={2019},
eprint={1904.07854},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.LG},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.07854},
}
Temporal / relative
2016/12Unsupervised Perceptual Rewards for Imitation Learning
PreviewUnsupervised Perceptual Rewards for Imitation Learning overview
RSS 2017Project
BibTeX
@misc{sermanet2017unsupervisedperceptualrewardsimitation,
title={Unsupervised Perceptual Rewards for Imitation Learning},
author={Pierre Sermanet and Kelvin Xu and Sergey Levine},
year={2017},
eprint={1612.06699},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.06699},
}
Temporal / relative

Data & Benchmark Lens

Progress data construction and benchmark taxonomy

How progress supervision is constructed

Human involvementTypical pipelineTrade-off
Human-driventeleoperation, human videos, scalar labels, success cutoffs, keyframes, reward sketches, comparisonsstrongest semantic grounding; expensive and subjective
Human-in-the-loopsparse anchors, interpolation, model proposals with verification, active queries, prompt/API designbalances control and scale; sparse checks can miss systematic errors
Fully automatedtemporal order, simulator predicates, expert/noisy policies, VLM/LLM labels, synthetic reversals and failuresscales well; inherits simplifying assumptions and annotator bias

What a benchmark can actually validate

Evaluation goalWhat it testsRepresentative evidence
Progress fidelityDoes the score represent advancement?scalar calibration · temporal consistency · relative ordering · task grounding · uncertainty/answerability
Robustness & generalizationDoes that meaning survive distribution shift?unseen tasks · new viewpoints/scenes · cross-embodiment transfer · non-monotonic execution
Downstream utilityIs the signal useful for decision making?online RL · offline relabeling · retrieval/reranking · planning/action selection

A reward can improve policy learning without faithfully representing progress. Conversely, a calibrated progress estimator may still be too sparse, noisy, or expensive for closed-loop control. The survey treats fidelity and utility as separate claims.

Open Problems

  • Weak temporal assumptions. Later frames are not necessarily better under pauses, retries, regressions, or alternative strategies.
  • Partial observability. RGB alone may miss history, contact force, grasp stability, slipping, and other physical state.
  • Generalization and calibration. Scores often change meaning across tasks, views, scenes, and embodiments; uncertainty and abstention remain underdeveloped.
  • Closed-loop reliability. Automatic labels can be biased, learned rewards can be exploited, and frequent reward queries can be costly.

Repository Layout

.
├── README.md            # survey map + curated paper gallery
├── img/                 # paper previews and README-ready figures
└── CONTRIBUTING.md

Citation

Until archival release metadata is available, use this repository citation:

@misc{zhang2026progressrewardmodeling,
  title  = {Progress Reward Modeling for Robotic Learning: A Comprehensive Survey},
  author = {Zhang, Jianshu and Wu, Keliang and Lu, Haoran and Liu, Anbang and
            Zhang, Ce and Yin, Weijie and Qian, Chengxuan and Yang, Xiyuan and
            Pan, Zhenyu and Ye, Guo and Liu, Han},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Survey manuscript},
  url    = {https://github.com/sterzhang/Awesome-Progress-Models}
}

Contributing

Contributions are welcome through pull requests. Please follow CONTRIBUTING.md.

To keep this repository consistent with the survey, new README entries should either be cited in the survey or be proposed together with the corresponding survey citation update.