Go to ICLR 2025 Conference homepageBridging the Reality Gap: A Benchmark for Physical Reasoning in General World Models with Various Physical Phenomena beyond Mechanics
While general world models have demonstrated excellent capability in modeling and simulating the world through video understanding and generation, their ability to reason about physical phenomena beyond mechanics remains underexplored. This includes crucial aspects like thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and optics, all of which are fundamental for simulating and predicting real-world dynamics. Existing benchmarks for evaluating physical reasoning in models often rely on datasets consisting solely of simulator-generated, virtual videos, limiting their generalizability to real-world scenarios. This limitation hinders the comprehensive evaluation of general world models' physical reasoning in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Physics-RW benchmark, a physical reasoning dataset constructed from real-world videos. Encompassing a broad spectrum of real-world phenomena—mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and optics—Physics-RW offers a comprehensive evaluation platform. We conducted extensive experiments on the Physics-RW benchmark, and the results indicate that there is still significant room for improvement in the physical reasoning abilities of general world models. We further analyzed the experimental results and explored several avenues for improvement. Virtual environment finetuning and physical knowledge injection via prompts demonstrate the potential for enhancing zero-shot physical reasoning ability.