PhysElite is a new bilingual multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate large language models on Olympiad-level physics problems. It contains 11,586 problems, each paired with visual diagrams, step-by-step bilingual Chinese‑English solution derivations, and the final answer. Benchmarking 18 models revealed that even the best reaches only 33.7% accuracy, and a step‑level analysis highlights where models falter in reasoning.
By Ruoran Xu, Wending Gao, Liyunfeng Chen, Aixin Shi, Haoyu Cheng, Zixiang Fang, Yiqiang Zou, Qiufeng Wang
arXiv:2607. 05199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics reasoning fails structurally in small language models: an error at any step propagates forward, corrupting every inference that follows.
By Raj Jaiswal, Dhruv Jain, Rishabh Dhawan, Sree Krishna Uppalapati, Shin'ichi Satoh, Tanuja Ganu, Rajiv Ratn Shah
arXiv:2610.32575v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models and agents have shown significant power in advanced physical research. In this paper, We introduce PHYRD, a living benchmark for...
By Qituan Zhang, Guo Chen, Linfeng Zhang, Wenlong Zhang
arXiv:2609.13152v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on static science benchmarks, yet their ability to reason about the physical world through active experim...
By Joseph Chan, Utkarsh Jha, Xiyin Yang, Abhinav Jarajapu, Anik Sahai, Eddie Hu, Robin Jeshua Deepak, Stefano Saravalle, Aditya Shah
arXiv:2607. 14303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning or inference-scaling models are the new generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of complex problem solving.
By Amir Bralin, N. Sanjay Rebello
arXiv:2610.33134v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Beyond math and code, Large language models (LLMs) are beginning to tackle problems that have traditionally required substantial training for theoret...
By Tong Liu, Bohan Li, Gongrui Cheng, Zixiong Yu, Yulan He, Volker Tresp
arXiv:2604.18936v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Despite the growing application of large language models (LLMs) to theoretical physics, there has been little academic exploration of how domain-sp...
By Nathaniel S. Woodward, Zhiqi Gao, Yurii Kvasiuk, Kendrick M. Smith, Frederic Sala, Moritz M\"unchmeyer
arXiv:2510. 12171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have shown strong scientific reasoning ability, but their performance on materials science problems remains less studied.
By Junkai Zhang, Jingru Gan, Xiaoxuan Wang, Zian Jia, Changquan Gu, Jianpeng Chen, Yanqiao Zhu, Mingyu Derek Ma, Dawei Zhou, Ling Li, Wei Wang
arXiv:2608.22048v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed on local hardware for privacy, cost, and accessibility reasons. Yet many evaluations emphasize accuracy...
By Orion Powers, Daniella Seum, Khaled Slhoub
The paper investigates whether domain-specific fine‑tuning benefits open‑ended scientific reasoning in astronomy. Using a curated 300‑question QA benchmark from 2017–2026 Olympiad‑style materials, the authors compare open‑weight, API‑served general‑purpose, multimodal, and astronomy‑specialized language models. Results show that strong general‑purpose models set the highest correctness baseline, but variations in metric agreement, judge sensitivity, benchmark composition, and modality suggest that domain specialization is task‑ and deployment‑dependent and that domain‑specific evaluation is crucial for scientific workflows.
By Vanessa Lama, Sanjay Das, Emily Herron, Yuan-Sen Ting, Tijmen de Haan, Junqi Yin, Tirthankar Ghosal, Feiyi Wang
OmniPhys is a large-scale multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate physics understanding and reasoning in models. It contains 15,246 questions and 19,850 images sourced from Chinese educational materials ranging from middle school to university level, with detailed annotations for fine-grained analysis. The benchmark also tests models’ ability to generate structured physics diagrams, a key component of authentic problem solving, and highlights gaps in current multimodal large language models.
By Hao Chen, Yumin Lin, Nadila Yushanjiang, Xin Lin, Min Zhang
AdvancedMathBench is a new benchmark suite that evaluates large language models on advanced mathematical proof generation and verification. It includes ProverBench, with 245 problems from undergraduate to doctoral qualifying‑exam levels, and VerifierBench, which tests models’ ability to judge proof validity using 888 expert‑annotated trajectories. The suite features an automatic verification pipeline trained on expert data, and results show that even state‑of‑the‑art models perform poorly, highlighting a gap between generation and verification skills.
By Lingkai Kong, Zijian Wu, Yuzhe Gu, Haiteng Zhao, Zhouqi Hua, Wenyong Huang, Shuang Sun, Zhicheng Xiong, Xiaotian Zhang, Shuya Zhao, Yan Wang, Disheng Xu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen