arXiv:2610.15228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Words are increasingly becoming an interface for action: large language models (LLMs) can now invoke tools, operate devices, and make decisions that af...
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...
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.
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.
SpaceAct is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on 3D spatial and temporal reasoning through closed‑loop physical action and active perception. It uses interlocking bricks and mechanical puzzles to create 108 verified instances across 36 task families, requiring models to reconstruct 3D geometry, anticipate dynamics, and execute precise 6‑DoF poses while avoiding collisions. The accompanying SAPA framework provides diagnostic modes and active‑perception capabilities, revealing that even with a valid plan, current models struggle with 3D visual grounding and action refinement.
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...
The paper introduces a five-task diagnostic experiment that separates perceptual and reasoning failures in multimodal large language models on physics and geometry benchmarks. It finds that misinterpreting diagrams hurts performance even on text-only solvable problems, and that accuracy improves when models receive human-authored captions. The study shows that correcting captions can recover many errors, revealing distinct reasoning bottlenecks that differ by domain, while a heavily pretrained model still underperforms and often truncates reasoning traces.
Previous work has evaluated physics reasoning in foundation models using synthetic or semi-synthetic scenes and visual question-answering tasks. However, these benchmarks emphasize high-level events and lack the visual fidelity required to assess true low-level Newtonian understanding.
arXiv:2503.21821v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Physics, a benchmark for evaluating foundation models on advanced physics problem solving. It contains 1034 annotated, open-ended prob...
arXiv:2608. 14615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on established code-generation and mathematical-reasoning benchmarks, but their capabilities in mechanics and spatial geometry, here denoted as mechanical engineering awareness, has not been quantified systematically.
PhysiCalWorld introduces a method for calibrating action‑conditioned world models to instance‑specific physics by encoding an exploratory interaction clip into a compact physics descriptor token. This token grounds future predictions in the actual physical behavior of a scene without requiring fine‑tuning or explicit physics labels, and can be reused across rollouts with minimal compute overhead. Experiments across four diverse environments demonstrate significant improvements in rollout prediction accuracy and visual planning success, while the learned descriptors form a physically structured latent space that generalizes beyond the training physics ranges.
arXiv:2606. 29315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to take actions in the real world and support human decision-making, yet most agents rely on parametric knowledge, fixed post-training data, retrieval, or search.