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.
Recent advances in image-to-video generation have improved visual realism, making physically grounded and controllable dynamics an important step toward future world simulation. Current models often generate plausible motion, but it is not reliably governed by explicit physical causes, and instance-level constraints can leak or become entangled in multi-object interactions.
Physics engines facilitate large-scale training and evaluation for embodied intelligence, while generative video world models are emerging as implicit simulators of future states and interactions. However, existing evaluations of physical fidelity are often conducted in isolation and rely heavily on perceptual similarity or human judgments, providing limited insight into which physical principles or parameters are violated.
Training and evaluating spatial reasoning in embodied agents requires diverse environments that are both geometrically faithful and semantically queryable. Synthetic simulators offer ground truth semantics but sacrifice realism; simulators based on reconstructions of real-world environments have realistic appearance but lack ground truth semantics by default.
arXiv:2602. 08058v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the presence of occlusions and measurement noise, geometrically accurate scene reconstructions -- which fit the sensor data -- can still be physically incorrect.
arXiv:2608. 05948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics engines facilitate large-scale training and evaluation for embodied intelligence, while generative video world models are emerging as implicit simulators of future states and interactions.
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.
arXiv:2602. 10840v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely studied in areas such as mathematical reasoning, complex coding, and scientific problem solving.
arXiv:2508. 10956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by human categorization, visual reasoning about object properties, such as physical attributes and functions, involves identifying and recognizing low-level details and higher-level abstractions.
arXiv:2608. 15006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although visual reasoning is crucial for solving complex geometry tasks, existing vision-language models rely heavily on text-only reasoning.
arXiv:2606. 09368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scene Graphs (SGs) provide structured representations of visual scenes by modeling objects and their pairwise relationships.
Learning broad world knowledge directly from raw visual data is a fundamental capability of intelligence. We introduce UniVR, the first investigation into simultaneously learning complex reasoning, fine-grained physical dynamics, and long-term planning from pure visual demonstrations.
Video generation models are increasingly capable of producing realistic videos, but they still struggle to generate videos that follow basic physical laws. Compounding this is a lack of reliable granular evaluation methods for localizing and specifying physical law violations in videos.