BilliardPhys-Bench: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning and Visual Dynamics of Multimodal LLMs

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 29 May 2026] BilliardPhys-Bench: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning and Visual Dynamics of Multimodal LLMs Ben Wang, Xiaogang Li, Ruochen Gao, Peiyao Xiao, Chengliang Xu, Zeyu Wang, Zichao Chen, Bing Zhao, Hu Wei Current multimodal models handle static image recognition well, but intuitive physical reasoning remains a weakness. Predicting how objects will move and interact from a single image is still difficult for these systems. We present BilliardPhys-Bench, a benchmark for physical reasoning in synthetic billiards environments. Its procedural engine generates randomized scenarios with friction and elastic collisions. The benchmark tests three abilities: (1) predicting ball-to-ball collisions, (2) reasoning about wall bounces, and (3) estimating final ball positions after motion stops. We evaluate recent MLLMs from the GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Qwen families. Performance drops as simulation time increases and scene geometry grows more complex. We also observe a consistent failure mode we call "stasis bias": when the correct physical outcome is harder to infer, models tend to predict no interaction. These findings show where current MLLMs break down on visual dynamics and point toward the need for better physical inductive biases in multimodal architectures. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Applied Physics (physics.app-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2605.30900 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.30900v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.30900 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ben Wang [view email] [v1] Fri, 29 May 2026 06:34:15 UTC (5,022 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs physics physics.app-ph References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)