Daily Papers

Building omni-modal models with physical intelligence requires fine-grained supervision that captures physical evidence such as contact, support, deformation, and state transitions. However, existing omni-modal captioners primarily model general audiovisual semantics and often overlook transient or spatially localized physical evidence. We present a unified framework for physics-aware audiovisual captioning spanning data construction, training, and evaluation. Firstly, we build a data construction pipeline that identifies physics-rich clips and leverages OmniFysics-Agent to coordinate audio, visual, and physical-perception tools for collecting spatiotemporally aligned and traceable cross-modal evidence; within the Agent, a physical perception model (PPM) fine-tuned on approximately 2M image-level samples serves as a dedicated tool for extracting object-interaction and state-change cues. Secondly, we build the Daily-Physics 50K dataset and introduce the evidence-driven OmniPhysCap (OPC) benchmark to evaluate the recovery of physical and cross-modal evidence from generated captions. Finally, we train OmniFysics-Captioner from the resulting data. Our Captioner matches Gemini 3.1 Pro on audiovisual captioning, achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple video-captioning benchmarks, and substantially outperforms other open-source models. Ablations show that PPM evidence improves physical coverage and produces finer-grained, more reliable cross-modal descriptions.

We present a new cosmological, magnetohydrodynamical simulation for galaxy formation: TNG50, the third and final installment of the IllustrisTNG project. TNG50 evolves 2x2160^3 dark-matter particles and gas cells in a volume 50 comoving Mpc across. It hence reaches a numerical resolution typical of zoom-in simulations, with a baryonic element mass of 8.5x10^4 Msun and an average cell size of 70-140 parsecs in the star-forming regions of galaxies. Simultaneously, TNG50 samples ~700 (6,500) galaxies with stellar masses above 10^10 (10^8) Msun at z=1. Here we investigate the structural and kinematical evolution of star-forming galaxies across cosmic time (0 < z < 6). We quantify their sizes, disk heights, 3D shapes, and degree of rotational vs. dispersion-supported motions as traced by rest-frame V-band light (i.e. roughly stellar mass) and by Halpha light (i.e. star-forming and dense gas). The unprecedented resolution of TNG50 enables us to model galaxies with sub-kpc half-light radii and with <300-pc disk heights. Coupled with the large-volume statistics, we characterize a diverse, redshift- and mass-dependent structural and kinematical morphological mix of galaxies all the way to early epochs. Our model predicts that for star-forming galaxies the fraction of disk-like morphologies, based on 3D stellar shapes, increases with both cosmic time and galaxy stellar mass. Gas kinematics reveal that the vast majority of 10^9-11.5 Msun star-forming galaxies are rotationally-supported disks for most cosmic epochs (Vmax/sigma>2-3, z<5), being dynamically hotter at earlier epochs (z>1.5). Despite large velocity dispersion at high redshift, cold and dense gas in galaxies predominantly arranges in disky or elongated shapes at all times and masses; these gaseous components exhibit rotationally-dominated motions far exceeding the collisionless stellar bodies.

We introduce PHYSICS, a comprehensive benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. It contains 1297 expert-annotated problems covering six core areas: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, electromagnetism, atomic physics, and optics. Each problem requires advanced physics knowledge and mathematical reasoning. We develop a robust automated evaluation system for precise and reliable validation. Our evaluation of leading foundation models reveals substantial limitations. Even the most advanced model, o3-mini, achieves only 59.9% accuracy, highlighting significant challenges in solving high-level scientific problems. Through comprehensive error analysis, exploration of diverse prompting strategies, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based knowledge augmentation, we identify key areas for improvement, laying the foundation for future advancements.

While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, open-ended challenges found in frontier physics research? And crucially, what kinds of reasoning tasks do physicists want LLMs to assist with? To address these questions, we present the CritPt (Complex Research using Integrated Thinking - Physics Test, pronounced "critical point"), the first benchmark designed to test LLMs on unpublished, research-level reasoning tasks that broadly covers modern physics research areas, including condensed matter, quantum physics, atomic, molecular & optical physics, astrophysics, high energy physics, mathematical physics, statistical physics, nuclear physics, nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics and biophysics. CritPt consists of 71 composite research challenges designed to simulate full-scale research projects at the entry level, which are also decomposed to 190 simpler checkpoint tasks for more fine-grained insights. All problems are newly created by 50+ active physics researchers based on their own research. Every problem is hand-curated to admit a guess-resistant and machine-verifiable answer and is evaluated by an automated grading pipeline heavily customized for advanced physics-specific output formats. We find that while current state-of-the-art LLMs show early promise on isolated checkpoints, they remain far from being able to reliably solve full research-scale challenges: the best average accuracy among base models is only 4.0% , achieved by GPT-5 (high), moderately rising to around 10% when equipped with coding tools. Through the realistic yet standardized evaluation offered by CritPt, we highlight a large disconnect between current model capabilities and realistic physics research demands, offering a foundation to guide the development of scientifically grounded AI tools.

Recently, the physical capabilities of (M)LLMs have garnered increasing attention. However, existing benchmarks for physics suffer from two major gaps: they neither provide systematic and up-to-date coverage of real-world physics competitions such as physics Olympiads, nor enable direct performance comparison with humans. To bridge these gaps, we present HiPhO, the first benchmark dedicated to high school physics Olympiads with human-aligned evaluation. Specifically, HiPhO highlights three key innovations. (1) Comprehensive Data: It compiles 13 latest Olympiad exams from 2024-2025, spanning both international and regional competitions, and covering mixed modalities that encompass problems spanning text-only to diagram-based. (2) Professional Evaluation: We adopt official marking schemes to perform fine-grained grading at both the answer and step level, fully aligned with human examiners to ensure high-quality and domain-specific evaluation. (3) Comparison with Human Contestants: We assign gold, silver, and bronze medals to models based on official medal thresholds, thereby enabling direct comparison between (M)LLMs and human contestants. Our large-scale evaluation of 30 state-of-the-art (M)LLMs shows that: across 13 exams, open-source MLLMs mostly remain at or below the bronze level; open-source LLMs show promising progress with occasional golds; closed-source reasoning MLLMs can achieve 6 to 12 gold medals; and most models still have a significant gap from full marks. These results highlight a substantial performance gap between open-source models and top students, the strong physical reasoning capabilities of closed-source reasoning models, and the fact that there is still significant room for improvement. HiPhO, as a rigorous, human-aligned, and Olympiad-focused benchmark for advancing multimodal physical reasoning, is open-source and available at https://github.com/SciYu/HiPhO.

The discipline of physics stands as a cornerstone of human intellect, driving the evolution of technology and deepening our understanding of the fundamental principles of the cosmos. Contemporary literature includes some works centered on the task of solving physics problems - a crucial domain of natural language reasoning. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of frontier LLMs in solving physics problems, both mathematical and descriptive. We also employ a plethora of inference-time techniques and agentic frameworks to improve the performance of the models. This includes the verification of proposed solutions in a cumulative fashion by other, smaller LLM agents, and we perform a comparative analysis of the performance that the techniques entail. There are significant improvements when the multi-agent framework is applied to problems that the models initially perform poorly on. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation benchmark for physics problems, {rm P{small HYSICS}E{small VAL}}, consisting of 19,609 problems sourced from various physics textbooks and their corresponding correct solutions scraped from physics forums and educational websites. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/areebuzair/PhysicsEval.

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has moved the frontier from puzzle-solving to science-grade reasoning-the kind needed to tackle problems whose answers must stand against nature, not merely fit a rubric. Physics is the sharpest test of this shift, which binds symbols to reality in a fundamental way, serving as the cornerstone of most modern technologies. In this work, we manage to advance physics research by developing large language models with exceptional physics reasoning capabilities, especially excel at solving Olympiad-level physics problems. We introduce P1, a family of open-source physics reasoning models trained entirely through reinforcement learning (RL). Among them, P1-235B-A22B is the first open-source model with Gold-medal performance at the latest International Physics Olympiad (IPhO 2025), and wins 12 gold medals out of 13 international/regional physics competitions in 2024/2025. P1-30B-A3B also surpasses almost all other open-source models on IPhO 2025, getting a silver medal. Further equipped with an agentic framework PhysicsMinions, P1-235B-A22B+PhysicsMinions achieves overall No.1 on IPhO 2025, and obtains the highest average score over the 13 physics competitions. Besides physics, P1 models also present great performance on other reasoning tasks like math and coding, showing the great generalibility of P1 series.

Recent physics foundation models claim general spatiotemporal forecasting ability, yet their evaluations often collapse performance into a single average score under a fixed training distribution. This makes it difficult to determine whether a model has learned generalizable physical dynamics or only performs well under particular settings. We construct a benchmark with 8 physical dynamics, 3 training-data mixtures, and 25 test regimes induced by dynamic-scale and initial-condition complexity shifts, covering in-distribution, distribution-shift, and out-of-distribution settings. We evaluate five physics foundation model architectures and four model variants per architecture (scratch and three pretrained sizes), resulting in 60,000 measurements. Our results show that current physics foundation models behave as conditional rather than universal generalists: their generality depends on the physical regime, temporal scale, initial-condition setting, pretraining, model size, and architecture. Improving the training data distribution only partially mitigates this limitation. Pretraining and scaling are also unable to reliably remove their ability biases. We argue that improving physics foundation models requires moving beyond scaling models or expanding data, toward learning mechanisms that better capture transferable physical knowledge across regimes, temporal scales, and distribution shifts.

Physics is central to understanding and shaping the real world, and the ability to solve physics problems is a key indicator of real-world physical intelligence. Physics Olympiads, renowned as the crown of competitive physics, provide a rigorous testbed requiring complex reasoning and deep multimodal understanding, yet they remain largely underexplored in AI research. Existing approaches are predominantly single-model based, and open-source MLLMs rarely reach gold-medal-level performance. To address this gap, we propose PhysicsMinions, a coevolutionary multi-agent system for Physics Olympiad. Its architecture features three synergistic studios: a Visual Studio to interpret diagrams, a Logic Studio to formulate solutions, and a Review Studio to perform dual-stage verification. The system coevolves through an iterative refinement loop where feedback from the Review Studio continuously guides the Logic Studio, enabling the system to self-correct and converge towards the ground truth. Evaluated on the HiPhO benchmark spanning 7 latest physics Olympiads, PhysicsMinions delivers three major breakthroughs: (i) Strong generalization: it consistently improves both open-source and closed-source models of different sizes, delivering clear benefits over their single-model baselines; (ii) Historic breakthroughs: it elevates open-source models from only 1-2 to 6 gold medals across 7 Olympiads, achieving the first-ever open-source gold medal in the latest International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) under the average-score metric; and (iii) Scaling to human expert: it further advances the open-source Pass@32 score to 26.8/30 points on the latest IPhO, ranking 4th of 406 contestants and far surpassing the top single-model score of 22.7 (ranked 22nd). Generally, PhysicsMinions offers a generalizable framework for Olympiad-level problem solving, with the potential to extend across disciplines.

We present a suite of 50 unpublished research-level theoretical physics problems with verifiable answers. Without AI assistance, a typical problem in our collection could be solved by a world expert in about a day or less but would take considerably longer for experts in adjacent specialties. We test the ability of off-the-shelf AI agents to tackle these problems autonomously, without human hints. When given access to tools available in a realistic setting, including the ability to search the literature and write scripts for numerical and symbolic work, the best-performing agent, GPT-6-Astra harnessed in Codex, obtains the final answers with a near-perfect accuracy of 98% at an average cost under USD 3 per problem. On average, agents show only small changes in accuracy when denied web search and access to background research papers, suggesting significant memorization of the literature. These results suggest that state-of-the-art agents can accurately perform concrete calculations required across theoretical physics research. We comment on the broader implications of these findings and discuss possible explanations for the current lack of agent-led breakthroughs in theoretical physics despite their outstanding problem-solving abilities.

Large language models have revolutionized artificial intelligence by enabling large, generalizable models trained through self-supervision. This paradigm has inspired the development of scientific foundation models (FMs). However, applying this capability to experimental particle physics is challenging due to the sparse, spatially distributed nature of detector data, which differs dramatically from natural language. This work addresses if an FM for particle physics can scale and generalize across diverse tasks. We introduce a new dataset with more than 11 million particle collision events and a suite of downstream tasks and labeled data for evaluation. We propose a novel self-supervised training method for detector data and demonstrate its neural scalability with models that feature up to 188 million parameters. With frozen weights and task-specific adapters, this FM consistently outperforms baseline models across all downstream tasks. The performance also exhibits robust data-efficient adaptation. Further analysis reveals that the representations extracted by the FM are task-agnostic but can be specialized via a single linear mapping for different downstream tasks.

High-fidelity simulations and complex inverse problems, such as detector modeling and unfolding, are computationally intensive bottlenecks across subatomic physics, yet essential for accurate physical interpretation. While Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) offers a robust acceleration approach, we demonstrate its standard training loss is fundamentally misleading. Specifically, utilizing a Jefferson Lab Nuclear Physics (NP) kinematic dataset (γp to ρ^0 p to π^+π^- p), we expose that CFM loss plateaus prematurely, obscuring ongoing physical refinement. To verify this disconnect is a dataset-agnostic pathology, we introduce ScatterPrism, an efficient generative surrogate evaluated against both the NP data and synthetic stress tests modeling challenging 1D distribution topologies. Coupling these benchmarks, we establish that physics-informed metrics continue improving long after standard loss converges. Consequently, we propose a multi-metric diagnostic protocol to ensure true kinematic fidelity without data memorization. Driven by NP challenges relevant to the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), this unified machinery has strong potential to extend to High-Energy Physics (HEP) applications, such as jet modeling. Furthermore, the framework holds promise for broader domains requiring rigorous generative reliability, including medical imaging, astrophysics, and quantitative finance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on advanced reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding competitions. Meanwhile, physics, despite being both reasoning-intensive and essential to real-world understanding, received limited academic and industrial attention. This paper introduces PHYSICS, a dataset containing 16,568 high-quality physics problems spanning subjects and difficulty levels, to facilitate this issue. Specifically, PHYSICS is curated with exercises from over 100 textbooks through a carefully designed pipeline for quality control. It covers five major physics domains: Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Thermodynamics, Optics, and Modern Physics. It also spans a wide range of difficulty levels, from high school to graduate-level physics courses. To utilize the data for improving and evaluating the model's physical reasoning capabilities, we split the dataset into training and test sets, and provide reasoning paths generated by powerful reasoning models for the training data to facilitate model training. In addition, for the evaluation part, we find that existing evaluation frameworks exhibit biases in aspects such as units, simplification, and precision in physics domain. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we introduce a Rule+Model evaluation framework tailored to physics problems. Our evaluations on current state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models highlight the limitations of current models in handling physics-related tasks. We hope that our dataset and evaluation methodology will jointly advance the development of LLMs in the field of physics.