arXiv:2508. 12448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) lets large language models (LLMs) solve new tasks from prompts alone, across an ever-widening range of domains, yet the mechanisms underlying this ability remain poorly understood.
arXiv:2510. 25306v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Partial physical knowledge--governing structures known, constitutive relations or their combinations not--pervades spatiotemporal systems.
The paper investigates how LLaMA 3.1‑8B models numerical sequence patterns, focusing on time‑series prediction. By designing a task that requires detecting structural cues—specifically first differences in a sequence—the authors show that the model performs well and internally computes and stores these differences. Probing and activation‑patching experiments reveal that LLaMA retrieves and applies the first‑difference via an induction‑like circuit, marking one of the first demonstrations of concept induction in large language models.
The paper introduces a framework that separates physical modeling from execution in physics reasoning tasks. It uses a two‑stage post‑training approach: supervised fine‑tuning to build structured models and reinforcement learning with rubric‑based feedback to refine them. Experiments on PhysReason, PhyX, and SeePhys show that this explicit modeling improves reasoning performance by about 3% on average for small LLMs.
arXiv:2605. 29283v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent physics foundation models claim general spatiotemporal forecasting ability, yet their evaluations often collapse performance into a single average score under a fixed training distribution.
The paper proposes an unsupervised learning approach that uses program synthesis to translate detailed simulation traces into sparse, high‑level structural patterns, making them easier for large language models to interpret. These pattern detectors can be guided by human‑provided labels such as "rigid collision" or "stretching spring" and produce transparent, explainable functions mapping system states to concise annotations. Experiments on a physics benchmark show that the annotated representations improve natural language reasoning about specific physical systems and enable natural‑language goals to be converted into reward programs for solution search.
arXiv:2503.19081v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific foundation models (SciFMs) aim to learn generalizable representations of physical systems governed by partial differential equations (PD...
The paper introduces an in‑span adaptation technique for reduced‑order models, where the reduced subspace is continually updated using the model’s own predictions via an incremental singular‑value decomposition with a forgetting factor. This creates a trajectory‑informed spectral preconditioner that reweights and realigns the basis without changing the subspace, enabling the model to better absorb future out‑of‑span corrections. The authors demonstrate the method on a 3‑D spiral example and nonlinear PDEs such as viscous Burgers and Fisher–KPP, and relate the approach to in‑context learning in dynamical systems.
arXiv:2607. 10285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study how unsupervised autoencoders trained on microscopic spin configurations from the Ising model learn macroscopic, theory-relevant variables underlying the data-generating process.
arXiv:2605.26087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Frontier LLMs now perform strongly across a wide range of physics evaluations, but it is hard to disentangle genuine reasoning from recall of...
arXiv:2604. 07366v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Partial differential equations (PDEs) govern nearly every physical process in science and engineering, but solving them at scale remains prohibitively expensive.
arXiv:2608.31025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring object dynamics from visual observations is essential for intelligent agents to reason about and interact with the physical world, yet remain...
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.