PhysicsMinions: Winning Gold Medals in the Latest Physics Olympiads with a Coevolutionary Multimodal Multi-Agent System

Fangchen Yu, Junchi Yao, Ziyi Wang, Haiyuan Wan, Youling Huang, Bo Zhang, Shuyue Hu, Dongzhan Zhou, Ning Ding, Ganqu Cui, LEI BAI, Wanli Ouyang, Peng Ye

Keywords: physics Olympiad, multi-agent system, coevolutionary framework, multimodal model

TL;DR: PhysicsMinions is a coevolutionary multimodal multi-agent system that achieves gold-medal performance in latest physics Olympiads, significantly outperforming single-model baselines and advancing open-source models to human-expert levels.

Abstract: Physics is central to understanding and shaping the real world, and the ability to solve physics problems is a key indicator of real-world physical intelligence. Physics Olympiads, renowned as the crown of competitive physics, provide a rigorous testbed requiring complex reasoning and deep multimodal understanding, yet they remain largely underexplored in AI research. Existing approaches are predominantly single-model based, and open-source MLLMs rarely reach gold-medal-level performance. To address this gap, we propose PhysicsMinions, a coevolutionary multi-agent system for Physics Olympiad. Its architecture features three synergistic studios: a Visual Studio to interpret diagrams, a Logic Studio to formulate solutions, and a Review Studio to perform dual-stage verification. The system coevolves through an iterative refinement loop where feedback from the Review Studio continuously guides the Logic Studio, enabling the system to self-correct and converge towards the ground truth. Evaluated on the HiPhO benchmark spanning 7 latest physics Olympiads, PhysicsMinions delivers three major breakthroughs: (i) Strong generalization: it consistently improves both open-source and closed-source models of different sizes, delivering clear benefits over their single-model baselines; (ii) Historic breakthroughs: it elevates open-source models from only 1–2 to 6 gold medals across 7 Olympiads, achieving the first-ever open-source gold medal in the latest International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) under the average-score metric; and (iii) Scaling to human expert: it further advances the open-source Pass@32 score to 26.8/30 points on the latest IPhO, ranking 4$^\text{th}$ of 406 contestants and far surpassing the top single-model score of 22.7 (ranked 22$^\text{nd}$). Generally, PhysicsMinions offers a generalizable framework for Olympiad-level problem solving, with the potential to extend across disciplines.

Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)

Submission Number: 1350