mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

PHYRE: A New Benchmark for Physical Reasoning

arXiv 1908.05656 ↗First posted 15 Aug 2019cs.LG cs.AI stat.MLcited by 137

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Cited by 23 in LLM reasoning, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding and reasoning about physics is an important ability of intelligent agents. We develop the PHYRE benchmark for physical reasoning that contains a set of simple classical mechanics puzzles in a 2D physical environment. The benchmark is designed to encourage the development of learning algorithms that are sample-efficient and generalize well across puzzles. We test several modern learning algorithms on PHYRE and find that these algorithms fall short in solving the puzzles efficiently. We expect that PHYRE will encourage the development of novel sample-efficient agents that learn efficient but useful models of physics. For code and to play PHYRE for yourself, please visit https://player.phyre.ai.

Key facts. Cited by 137 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2019.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 20; 2022: 18; 2023: 19; 2024: 14; 2025: 21; 2026: 45.

137 papers.

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  1. 2024How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspectivecited by 204
  2. 2022SlotFormer: Unsupervised Visual Dynamics Simulation with Object-Centric Modelscited by 146
  3. 2021Physion: Evaluating Physical Prediction from Vision in Humans and Machinescited by 145
  4. 2025VideoPhy-2: A Challenging Action-Centric Physical Commonsense Evaluation in Video Generationcited by 141
  5. 2022Mind's Eye: Grounded Language Model Reasoning through Simulationcited by 83
  6. 2023Generalization on the Unseen, Logic Reasoning and Degree Curriculumcited by 73
  7. 2021Grounding Physical Concepts of Objects and Events Through Dynamic Visual Reasoningcited by 68
  8. 2022ComPhy: Compositional Physical Reasoning of Objects and Events from Videoscited by 61
  9. 2021Dynamic Visual Reasoning by Learning Differentiable Physics Models from Video and Languagecited by 55
  10. 2021Systematic Evaluation of Causal Discovery in Visual Model Based Reinforcement Learningcited by 53
  11. 2025IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environmentscited by 49
  12. 2021PROST: Physical Reasoning of Objects through Space and Timecited by 48
38 more
  1. 2023NEWTON: Are Large Language Models Capable of Physical Reasoning?cited by 45
  2. 2025Evaluating Newtonian Mechanics in Video Generative Models with Real Physical Systemscited by 44
  3. 2022A Benchmark for Compositional Visual Reasoningcited by 43
  4. 2021AGENT: A Benchmark for Core Psychological Reasoningcited by 42
  5. 2023Benchmarks for Automated Commonsense Reasoning: A Surveycited by 40
  6. 2024Kinetix: Investigating the Training of General Agents through Open-Ended Physics-Based Control Taskscited by 40
  7. 2023Visual cognition in multimodal large language modelscited by 38
  8. 2022Physical Design using Differentiable Learned Simulatorscited by 37
  9. 2024How Far Can Transformers Reason? The Globality Barrier and Inductive Scratchpadcited by 35
  10. 2025CausalVQA: A Physically Grounded Causal Reasoning Benchmark for Video Modelscited by 35
  11. 2022Bongard-HOI: Benchmarking Few-Shot Visual Reasoning for Human-Object Interactionscited by 34
  12. 2022A Review of Emerging Research Directions in Abstract Visual Reasoningcited by 33
  13. 2023MacGyver: Are Large Language Models Creative Problem Solvers?cited by 33
  14. 2026Causal-JEPA: Learning World Models through Object-Level Latent Maskingcited by 25
  15. 2025Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluationcited by 23
  16. 2021Capturing the objects of vision with neural networkscited by 21
  17. 2022A Survey on Machine Learning Approaches for Modelling Intuitive Physicscited by 20
  18. 2021Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics: Toward Verifiable Commonsense Language Understandingcited by 19
  19. 2023DDLP: Unsupervised Object-Centric Video Prediction with Deep Dynamic Latent Particlescited by 18
  20. 2023Bongard-OpenWorld: Few-Shot Reasoning for Free-form Visual Concepts in the Real Worldcited by 18
  21. 2026Interpreting Physics in Video World Modelscited by 18
  22. 2025ABench-Physics: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning in LLMs via High-Difficulty and Dynamic Physics Problemscited by 17
  23. 2025TRAVL: A Recipe for Making Video-Language Models Better Judges of Physics Implausibilitycited by 16
  24. 2023I-PHYRE: Interactive Physical Reasoningcited by 15
  25. 2022Towards Understanding How Machines Can Learn Causal Overhypothesescited by 13
  26. 2023Neural Foundations of Mental Simulation: Future Prediction of Latent Representations on Dynamic Scenescited by 13
  27. 2026WorldBench: Benchmarking Physical Understanding of World Models by Isolating Physics Conceptscited by 12
  28. 2022On the Learning Mechanisms in Physical Reasoningcited by 11
  29. 2023CLEVRER-Humans: Describing Physical and Causal Events the Human Waycited by 11
  30. 2023Understanding Physical Dynamics with Counterfactual World Modelingcited by 11
  31. 2024Compositional Physical Reasoning of Objects and Events from Videoscited by 11
  32. 2026Latent Particle World Models: Self-supervised Object-centric Stochastic Dynamics Modelingcited by 11
  33. 2021Phy-Q as a measure for physical reasoning intelligencecited by 10
  34. 2024SPARTAN: A Sparse Transformer World Model Attending to What Matterscited by 10
  35. 2026PhysicsMind: Sim and Real Mechanics Benchmarking for Physical Reasoning and Prediction in Foundational VLMs and World Modelscited by 10
  36. 2021Maintaining Common Ground in Dynamic Environmentscited by 9
  37. 2024Tackling the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus with Vision Transformers: the Importance of 2D Representation, Positions, and Objectscited by 9
  38. 2026PhysInOne: Visual Physics Learning and Reasoning in One Suitecited by 9

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