# HumanPhys: A Human-Centric Physical-World Perception Benchmark for Real-World Visual Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14679 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14679/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 63 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17161/) (2025)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [Kimi-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07491/) (2025)
- [R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10615/) (2025)
- [SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01584/) (2024)
- [MM-Eureka: Exploring the Frontiers of Multimodal Reasoning with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07365/) (2025)
- [Omni-MATH: A Universal Olympiad Level Mathematic Benchmark For Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07985/) (2024)
- [VideoChat-R1: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Perception via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06958/) (2025)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [DanceTrack: Multi-Object Tracking in Uniform Appearance and Diverse Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14690/) (2021)
- [Spatial-MLLM: Boosting MLLM Capabilities in Visual-based Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23747/) (2025)
- [OpenMathInstruct-2: Accelerating AI for Math with Massive Open-Source Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01560/) (2024)
- [MMSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Image Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23764/) (2025)
- [SpaceR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01805/) (2025)
- [SpatialBot: Precise Spatial Understanding with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13642/) (2024)
- [3DSRBench: A Comprehensive 3D Spatial Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07825/) (2024)
- [From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22976/) (2025)
- [Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Interwoven Thinking and Visual Drawing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09965/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce HumanPhys, a human-centric benchmark for real-world physical perception, and a training corpus emitted by the same pipeline. Each question targets a physically grounded quantity related to people, including depth, inter-person distance, gaze angle, displacement, velocity, heading-step trajectory, blink count, and contact-deformation strength. The rendered probes additionally test illumination inference from body and face cues and camera ego-motion, both with and without a person in the frame. All labels are derived programmatically from sensor calibration, source metadata, or renderer state, rather than written by annotators or produced by estimators on the benchmark frames. HumanPhys systematically probes six dimensions of human-centric physical perception: spatial state, kinematics, blink events, deformation, illumination, and camera pose. To the best of our knowledge, no existing MLLM benchmark-and-training corpus jointly supervises this set of human-centered physical quantities under direct metadata- or renderer-derived labels. The six dimensions appear only partially dissociable across the tested MLLMs. We benchmark a range of open- and closed-source MLLMs on HumanPhys and find that all six capability dimensions remain challenging for current models. We hope HumanPhys will support future research on multimodal systems that perceive and reason about people in the physical world.