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
arXiv AI
Sep 10

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.

By Aman Mehta, Riya Baviskar
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

CompAdapt: Adaptable Composite Motion Modeling for Physics-Consistent Text-to-Video Generation

CompAdapt is a physics-consistent text-to-video generation framework that extends diffusion-based models to handle composite physical behaviors such as coupled motions, multi-stage transitions, and multi-object collisions. It translates natural language prompts into structured physical semantics, enabling end-to-end specification of motion types, temporal relations, and initial parameters. The system introduces dynamics-aware prior matching for one-shot adaptation to new physical environments and a physics-aware latent feature fusion module to enhance visual fidelity during fast, complex motion, outperforming existing physics-constrained baselines on physics-focused T2V benchmarks.

By Haoran Qin (Harbin Institute of Technology, China), Renlong Wu (Harbin Institute of Technology, China), Tianyu Huang (Harbin Institute of Technology, China), Yukang Ding (Taobao, Alibaba Group, China), Hui Li (Harbin Institute of Technology, China), Wangmeng Zuo (Harbin Institute of Technology, China)
arXiv AI
Aug 7

GAUGE: A Measurement-Grounded Benchmark for Physical Fidelity in Simulation Engines and Video World Models

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.

By Shuai Wang, Yaxin Feng, Xuekun Jiang, Shihan Tian, Ningyu Yan, Xing Shen, Chaoyang Lyu, Hui Wang, Yunsong Zhou, Hanqing Wang, Jiangmiao Pang, Yang Xiang, Xing Gao, Chunhua Shen, Weinan Zhang