# Physical Plausibility Reasoning via HCM-GRPO: Empowering Compact Model for Superior Performance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10055 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10055/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 25 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06364/) (2023)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13286/) (2023)
- [SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05517/) (2024)
- [OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15098/) (2024)
- [R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12937/) (2025)
- [MuirBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Robust Multi-image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09411/) (2024)
- [Bilateral Reference for High-Resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03407/) (2024)
- [NaturalBench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Natural Adversarial Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14669/) (2024)
- [Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reward Model through Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03318/) (2025)
- [CC-OCR: A Comprehensive and Challenging OCR Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Literacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02210/) (2024)
- [CoMT: A Novel Benchmark for Chain of Multi-modal Thought on Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12932/) (2024)
- [GalleryGPT: Analyzing Paintings with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00491/) (2024)
- [Enhancing textual textbook question answering with large language models and retrieval augmented generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05128/) (2024)
- [Towards Fine-Grained Vision-Language Alignment for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26464/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [OmniFysics-Nano-V2 Technical Report: Understanding the Physical World Across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25738/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The performance of image generation has been significantly improved in recent years. However, the study of image screening is rare, and its performance with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is unsatisfactory due to the lack of data and the weak physical plausibility reasoning ability in MLLMs. In this work, we propose a complete solution to address these problems in terms of data and methodology. For data, we collect a comprehensive image screening dataset with over 128k samples, comprising about 640k images. Each sample consists of an original image and four generated images. The dataset evaluates the physical plausibility reasoning ability under four aspects: appearance deformation, physical shadow, placement layout, and extension rationality. Regarding data annotation, we investigate multiple approaches, including purely manual, fully automated, and answer-driven annotations, to acquire high-quality chains of thought (CoT) data in the most cost-effective manner. Methodologically, we introduce a Hard Cases Mining (HCM) strategy with a Dynamic Proportional Accuracy (DPA) reward into the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) framework, called HCM-GRPO. This enhanced method demonstrates superior physical plausibility reasoning capabilities compared to the original GRPO. Our experimental results reveal that even state-of-the-art closed-source MLLMs, such as GPT5.2 and Gemini3-Pro, exhibit unsatisfactory performance in physical plausibility reasoning. In contrast, by leveraging the HCM-GRPO, we are able to surpass the scores of both large-scale open-source and leading closed-source models with a much smaller model.