arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Decoupled Physical Modeling and Execution for Physics Reasoning

The paper introduces a framework that separates physical modeling from execution in physics reasoning tasks. It uses a two‑stage post‑training approach: supervised fine‑tuning to build structured models and reinforcement learning with rubric‑based feedback to refine them. Experiments on PhysReason, PhyX, and SeePhys show that this explicit modeling improves reasoning performance by about 3% on average for small LLMs.

By Ye Zhang, Xuehang Guo, Rui Pan, Pengfei Yu, Denghui Zhang, Manling Li, Qingyun Wang
arXiv AI
2d ago

Lost in Perception: Isolating Perceptual and Reasoning Failures in Multimodal Physics and Geometry Reasoning

The paper introduces a five-task diagnostic experiment that separates perceptual and reasoning failures in multimodal large language models on physics and geometry benchmarks. It finds that misinterpreting diagrams hurts performance even on text-only solvable problems, and that accuracy improves when models receive human-authored captions. The study shows that correcting captions can recover many errors, revealing distinct reasoning bottlenecks that differ by domain, while a heavily pretrained model still underperforms and often truncates reasoning traces.

By Raj Jaiswal, Sree Krishna Uppalapati, Dhruvkumar Patel, Ria Khatoniar, Tanuja Ganu, Rajiv Ratn Shah
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Large Language Models and their Awareness of Mechanics and Spatial Geometry

arXiv:2608. 14615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on established code-generation and mathematical-reasoning benchmarks, but their capabilities in mechanics and spatial geometry, here denoted as mechanical engineering awareness, has not been quantified systematically.

By Johannes Gerstmayr, Sebastian Weyrer, Tobias M\"oltner, Peter Manzl, Michael Pieber
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Hierarchical Experimentalist Agents

arXiv:2606. 29315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to take actions in the real world and support human decision-making, yet most agents rely on parametric knowledge, fixed post-training data, retrieval, or search.

By Abhranil Chandra, Sankaran Vaidyanathan, Utsav Dhanuka, Varun Gandhi, Scott Niekum