arXiv AI

Causal Scaffolding for Physical Reasoning: A Benchmark for Causally-Informed Physical World Understanding in VLMs

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 AI
Sep 25

Planning Takes More Than Token Prediction: Causal Plan for Benchmarking and Building Physically Grounded Embodied Reasoners

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.

By Zheng Lu, Mingqi Gao, Qinlei Xie, Wanqi Zhong, Hanwen Cui, Zirui Song, Lijie Wang, Chong Luo, Bei Liu, Yiming Li
arXiv Computer Vision
6d ago

CCRV-Bench: Constraint-Based Evaluation of Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

CCRV-Bench is a constraint‑driven benchmark designed to evaluate visual causal reasoning in vision‑language models on single‑image physical scenarios. It assesses four causal task dimensions—causal relation discovery, state prediction, causal diagnosis, and intervention—while applying constraints such as entity symbolization, spatial grounding, factual adversarial constraints, and minimalist output constraints to reduce shortcut learning. Experiments on 15 multimodal models reveal that constraint sensitivity varies by task and model, with intervention and spatial grounding having the largest impact and factual adversarial constraints improving causal diagnosis across models.

By Linyuan Gao, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv AI
Sep 24

AnchorReasoning: A Visual Grounding and Causal Reasoning Dataset in Long-Tail Autonomous Driving Scenarios

arXiv:2609. 28366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to long-tail autonomous driving, but existing driving datasets provide limited supervision for connecting decision-critical visual evidence with reasoning and planning.

By Zhipeng Bao, Wenjie Zhao, Tianle Zhu, Haohua Que, Chence Yang, Geng Yuan, Qianwen Li
arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

PhysVista: Benchmarking Physical Intelligence in VLMs via a Perception-Reasoning-Assessment Loop

PhysVista is a new benchmark that evaluates physical intelligence in Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) by integrating perception, reasoning, and plausibility assessment into a closed cognitive loop. It distinguishes between event‑level and scale‑level reasoning and tests models on both real‑world and AI‑generated videos to provide a holistic, fine‑grained analysis of physical understanding. Experiments show significant gaps in VLMs’ physical reasoning and plausibility assessment, underscoring the need for more principled, physically grounded multimodal designs.

By Xinge Peng, Yiting Lu, Tianwu Zhi, Wen Wen, Jianzhao Liu, Xin Li, Zhibo Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 14

PhysMRV: Physical Memory Retrieval and Verification for Physics Plausibility Reasoning

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.

By Wenyuan Wang, Lianyu Hu, Hao Wang, Yang Liu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Evaluating Explanation-Driven Vision-Language Reasoning via Generation Order Interventions

The paper investigates how the order of generating explanations—whether a rationale is produced before or after the answer—affects vision‑language reasoning. By conducting controlled experiments on knowledge‑intensive QA, visual entailment, and compositional grounding tasks, the authors show that larger models are required for reliable rationale‑first generation, while answer‑first generation is less susceptible to format errors. The study concludes that explanation ordering, model scale, pre‑training knowledge, fine‑tuning, and task structure jointly influence prediction accuracy and reasoning faithfulness.

By Siting Liang, Luca Rippe, Omar Adjali, Daniel Sonntag