ProgressLM: Towards Progress Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Jianshu Zhang, Chengxuan Qian University of California, Santa Barbara, Haosen Sun, Haoran Lu Northwestern University, Dingcheng Wang Northwestern University, Letian Xue Northwestern University, Northwestern University, Han Liu Northwestern University
原文摘要
Estimating task progress requires long-horizon and dynamic reasoning, going beyond static visual perception. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at describing what is visible in a single observation, it remains unclear whether they can infer how far a task has progressed from partial information. To study this question, we introduce Progress-Bench, a benchmark with over 3K instances for evaluating progress reasoning from a single observation. We further examine a human-inspired two-stage paradigm that combines episodic retrieval with mental simulation. We instantiate this paradigm through both training-free prompting and a training-based approach using the automatically curated ProgressLM-45K dataset. Experiments on 14 VLMs show that most models struggle with reliable progress estimation, and that training-free reasoning provides only limited and model-dependent benefits. In contrast, the training-based ProgressLM-3B achieves consistent improvements in accuracy, robustness to viewpoint variation, and handling of unanswerable cases, despite its small scale. Additional analyses reveal common failure patterns in existing VLMs and clarify when and why progress reasoning succeeds or fails.
cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表