arXiv AI

CALIPER: Clean Scenes Cannot Rank Physical Inference in Pretrained Visual Representations

CALIPER is a new benchmark that tests whether pretrained visual encoders can infer physical properties such as mass and friction from images. The test involves striking an object twice at known speeds, showing a third strike only up to contact, and asking a linear readout on frozen features to predict how far the object slides. Results show that in clean, fixed‑camera scenes all representations perform similarly, but when camera, lighting, and clutter are varied, only encoders that truly infer physics—like V‑JEPA 2—maintain performance, while random or raw pixel representations fail.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 10

MotionBlind: Probing the Illusion of Motion Understanding in Video-LLMs

arXiv:2609.09528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video large language models (Video-LLMs) are increasingly used as the perceptual front end of world models, a role that assumes they can read motion: h...

By Dhairya Bhatia, Bishoy Galoaa, Oliver Fritsche, Shahid Kamal, Muhammad Obaidullah Abdul Salam, Umer Saleem, Om Rastogi, Frania Felix Chettiar, Nesli Erdogmus, Sarah Ostadabbas
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

New Evidence, Same Choice: Testing Physical Experiment Selection in Vision Language Models

The paper introduces a new benchmark for vision‑language models that tests their ability to decide whether to answer a physics question immediately or to request additional experimental evidence. Each problem presents one measurement image and four possible physical worlds defined by two masses and two values of another property; the model must either stop and answer or choose the cheapest experiment that resolves the question. Across six open models and 144 parameter sets, the models almost always repeat the same action even when the optimal choice changes, and only a single model gets both decisions correct on 5.9% of cases.

By Sourajit Saha, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Nobin Sarwar, Shaswati Saha, Yuxuan Jiang, Siyuan Li, Qiheng Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

Beyond Visual Quality: Evaluating Physical Consistency under Ego-Motion with EgoGenEval

The paper introduces EgoGenEval, a new benchmark that assesses the physical consistency of visual generators under ego‑motion by measuring Camera Motion Grounding and Scene State Preservation across 1,400 cases and 2,360 target views. Experiments on 16 pose‑free generators and two pose‑conditioned references show that current models struggle to maintain both camera motion and scene state simultaneously. A follow‑up study using EgoGen‑Train demonstrates that pairwise supervision does not effectively improve both metrics together, suggesting the need for a trajectory‑centric training paradigm.

By Yilin Long, Chenming Zhu, Zitang Gou, Jingli Lin, Tai Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Principia: Relational Physics Tests for Video Models

Principia is a new benchmark that tests video models on Newtonian physics by evaluating relational consistency between paired objects, independent of calibration. It covers eight phenomena—gravity, restitution, friction, rotational inertia, projectile motion, momentum, pendulum, and mass‑spring oscillation—across translational, rotational, collisional, and oscillatory dynamics using real‑world scenes. The benchmark introduces a calibration‑independent consistency score and shows that current state‑of‑the‑art video generators perform poorly on it, with the best vision‑language model achieving only 67% accuracy on detecting physics violations.

By Varun Varma Thozhiyoor, Shivam Tripathi, Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan, Anand Bhattad