arXiv:2609.39135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical reasoning from video requires inferring latent physical properties and dynamics beyond direct observation. Direct VLM inference remains unreli...
The paper argues that current embodied vision‑language planning benchmarks favor linguistic next‑token prediction over physically grounded next‑state reasoning, leading models to rely on language priors rather than true causal dependencies. To address this, the authors introduce Causal‑Plan‑Bench, a diagnostic suite covering four causal dimensions, and Causal‑Plan‑1M, a million‑scale corpus of explicit causal reasoning traces extracted from egocentric videos. Extensive experiments show that existing models perform poorly on these tasks, while a new model trained with a tailored recipe—Causal Planner based on Qwen3‑VL‑8B—achieves significant gains, demonstrating the feasibility of physically grounded causal reasoning.
arXiv:2606. 05966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding and reasoning about the physical world is the foundation of intelligent behavior, yet state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) still fail at causal physical reasoning, often producing plausible but incorrect answers.
arXiv:2608. 04575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable physical reasoning from video requires understanding how objects move, interact, and respond to interventions.
arXiv:2607. 10190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on video understanding and visual question answering, yet they remain unreliable in reasoning about physical plausibility, where understanding object interactions, causal dynamics, and fundamental physical principles is essential.
arXiv:2608.27549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical understanding and reasoning depend on forming compact and generalizable representations of the world. While modern vision-language models can...
The paper introduces a framework that combines world models, which generate concrete visual rollouts of possible futures, with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that perform abstract reasoning. It proposes a controlled concrete reasoning approach and a new training method called Privileged‑Future On‑Policy Self‑Distillation (PF‑OPSD), which uses ground‑truth future videos as privileged teacher context during training while the student model never sees true futures at test time. Experiments on two human‑verified benchmarks, VRQABench and OpenWorldQA, show that PF‑OPSD improves performance by about 10–11% over baselines and enhances robustness to noisy or conflicting rollouts.
arXiv:2610. 32177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans reason about the physical world by flexibly combining different forms of inference as a problem unfolds.
arXiv:2608. 02150v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied intelligence and world models require video understanding systems to go beyond recognizing objects and actions and develop an understanding of physical regularities.
arXiv:2606. 18586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them.
Embodied intelligence and world models require video understanding systems to go beyond recognizing objects and actions and develop an understanding of physical regularities. However, despite their strong performance on general video understanding tasks, current video-language models still struggle to reliably determine whether an observed event conforms to specific physical laws.
arXiv:2609.05834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models promise a general route to embodied intelligence: learn predictive dynamics once, then reason, plan, and act with them. Increasingly, the...