Physics Context Builders: A Modular Framework for Physical Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Physical reasoning remains a significant challenge for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). This limitation arises from an inability to translate learned knowledge into predictions about physical behavior. Although continual fine-tuning can mitigate this issue, it is expensive for large models and impractical to perform repeatedly for every task. This necessitates the creation of modular and scalable ways to teach VLMs about physical reasoning. To that end, we introduce Physics Context Builders (PCBs), a modular framework where specialized smaller VLMs are fine-tuned to generate detailed physical scene descriptions. These can be used as physical contexts to enhance the reasoning capabilities of larger VLMs. PCBs enable the separation of visual perception from reasoning, allowing us to analyze their relative contributions to physical understanding. We perform experiments on CLEVRER and on Falling Tower, a stability detection dataset with both simulated and real-world scenes, to demonstrate that PCBs provide substantial performance improvements, increasing average accuracy by up to 13.8% on complex physical reasoning tasks. Notably, PCBs also show strong Sim2Real transfer, successfully generalizing from simulated training data to real-world scenes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".