Embodied intelligence and world models require video understanding systems to go beyond recognizing objects and actions and develop an understanding of physical regularities. However, despite their strong performance on general video understanding tasks, current video-language models still struggle to reliably determine whether an observed event conforms to specific physical laws.
arXiv:2608. 02150v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied intelligence and world models require video understanding systems to go beyond recognizing objects and actions and develop an understanding of physical regularities.
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.
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.
arXiv:2605.04515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) excel in general video understanding but often base physical judgments on event expectations rather than o...
arXiv:2609.38377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the physical consistency of generated videos remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches rely on off-the-shelf vision-language mode...
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 18586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them.
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.
Metric questions about video require vision-language models to use supplied real-world references to convert visual measurements into physical units. Yet we find that current models use this scale inf...
arXiv:2606. 09181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in video multimodal models have significantly improved VideoQA performance.
arXiv:2609.40358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video world models are expected to predict how the physical world evolves, yet they often produce visually plausible videos that violate basic physical...