# PhyBlock: A Progressive Benchmark for Physical Understanding and Planning via 3D Block Assembly

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08708 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08708/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 45 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12952/) (2023)
- [Interaction Networks for Learning about Objects, Relations and Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00222/) (2016)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05941/) (2024)
- [CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01442/) (2019)
- [RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02523/) (2024)
- [VLABench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Robotics Manipulation with Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18194/) (2024)
- [ViP-LLaVA: Making Large Multimodal Models Understand Arbitrary Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00784/) (2023)
- [Learning to Poke by Poking: Experiential Learning of Intuitive Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07419/) (2016)
- [PhysBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Physical World Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16411/) (2025)
- [LongVLM: Efficient Long Video Understanding via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03384/) (2024)
- [MMVU: Measuring Expert-Level Multi-Discipline Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12380/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [A1: A Fully Transparent Open-Source, Adaptive and Efficient Truncated Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05672/) (2026)
- [3D-MoRe: Unified Modal-Contextual Reasoning for Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12026/) (2025)
- [Aligning Perception, Reasoning, Modeling and Interaction: A Survey on Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04978/) (2025)
- [Can AI Understand the Language of Origami?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13856/) (2026)
- [Complementary Information Guided Occupancy Prediction via Multi-Level Representation Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13198/) (2025)
- [Invertible Neural Network Adapter for One-Step Flow Matching in Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19194/) (2026)
- [Towards Generalizable Visually Grounded Exploration of Household Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00845/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in reasoning and planning for embodied agents, their ability to comprehend physical phenomena, particularly within structured 3D environments, remains severely limited. To close this gap, we introduce PhyBlock, a progressive benchmark designed to assess VLMs on physical understanding and planning through robotic 3D block assembly tasks. PhyBlock integrates a novel four-level cognitive hierarchy assembly task alongside targeted Visual Question Answering (VQA) samples, collectively aimed at evaluating progressive spatial reasoning and fundamental physical comprehension, including object properties, spatial relationships, and holistic scene understanding. PhyBlock includes 2600 block tasks (400 assembly tasks, 2200 VQA tasks) and evaluates models across three key dimensions: partial completion, failure diagnosis, and planning robustness. We benchmark 21 state-of-the-art VLMs, highlighting their strengths and limitations in physically grounded, multi-step planning. Our empirical findings indicate that the performance of VLMs exhibits pronounced limitations in high-level planning and reasoning capabilities, leading to a notable decline in performance for the growing complexity of the tasks. Error analysis reveals persistent difficulties in spatial orientation and dependency reasoning. Surprisingly, chain-of-thought prompting offers minimal improvements, suggesting spatial tasks heavily rely on intuitive model comprehension. We position PhyBlock as a unified testbed to advance embodied reasoning, bridging vision-language understanding and real-world physical problem-solving.