# PhysScene: A Scene Graph Dataset for Scientific Visual Reasoning in Physics Experiments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09368 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09368/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 12 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06640/) (2017)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Scene Graphs: Generation and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01111/) (2021)
- [SpatialSense: An Adversarially Crowdsourced Benchmark for Spatial Relation Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02660/) (2019)
- [Towards Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Prompt-based Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08165/) (2022)
- [Review on Panoramic Imaging and Its Applications in Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05570/) (2022)
- [STAR: A First-Ever Dataset and A Large-Scale Benchmark for Scene Graph Generation in Large-Size Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09410/) (2024)
- [SR-GNN: Spatial Relation-aware Graph Neural Network for Fine-Grained Image Categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02109/) (2022)
- [Haystack: A Panoptic Scene Graph Dataset to Evaluate Rare Predicate Classes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02286/) (2023)
- [PhysLab: A Benchmark Dataset for Multi-Granularity Visual Parsing of Physics Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06631/) (2025)

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

- [Modeling Scientific Experiment Scenes: Dataset and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02892/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene Graphs (SGs) provide structured representations of visual scenes by modeling objects and their pairwise relationships. Despite recent progress, existing datasets primarily focus on generic natural contexts, leaving domain-specific and function-oriented scenes largely underexplored. This limitation restricts the evaluation of relational reasoning in scientific experimental scenes, thereby hindering the development of intelligent monitoring, analysis, and related applications in such scenes. To address this gap, we introduce PhysScene, the first SG dataset tailored to physics experiments. PhysScene encompasses specialized instruments, structured experimental setups, and functional relations intrinsic to experimental environments, enabling reasoning that extends beyond spatial co-occurrence to logical dependencies. Rather than pursuing large data scale, PhysScene focuses on strong semantic constraints and high relation density in experimental scenes, posing new challenges for existing scene parsing algorithms while offering opportunities for further improvements. Extensive analyses and experiments show that PhysScene complements existing benchmarks and establishes a valuable testbed for advancing scientific visual reasoning. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/ZMH-SDUST/PhysScene.