PHYBench: Holistic Evaluation of Physical Perception and Reasoning in Large Language Models

Shi Qiu; Shaoyang Guo; Zhuo-Yang Song; Yunbo Sun; Zeyu Cai; Jiashen Wei; Tianyu Luo; Yixuan Yin; Haoxu Zhang; Yi Hu; Chenyang Wang; Chencheng Tang; Haoling Chang; Qi Liu; Ziheng Zhou; Tianyu Zhang; Jingtian Zhang; Zhangyi Liu; Minghao Li; Yuku Zhang; Boxuan Jing; Xianqi Yin; Yutong Ren; Zizhuo Fu; Jiaming Ji; Weike Wang; Xudong Tian; Anqi Lv; Laifu Man; Jianxiang Li; Feiyu Tao; Qihua Sun; Zhou Liang; Yushu Mu; Zhongxuan Li; Jing-Jun Zhang; Shutao Zhang; Xiaotian Li; Xingqi Xia; Jiawei Lin; Zheyu Shen; Jiahang Chen; Qiuhao Xiong; Binran Wang; Fengyuan Wang; Ziyang Ni; Bohan Zhang; Fan Cui; Changkun Shao; Qing-Hong Cao; Ming-xing Luo; Yaodong Yang; Muhan Zhang; Hua Xing Zhu

arXiv · 2504.16074

PHYBench: Holistic Evaluation of Physical Perception and Reasoning in Large Language Models

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Abstract

Current benchmarks for evaluating the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant limitations: task oversimplification, data contamination, and flawed evaluation items. These deficiencies necessitate more rigorous assessment methods. To address these limitations, we introduce PHYBench, a benchmark of 500 original physics problems ranging from high school to Physics Olympiad difficulty. PHYBench addresses data contamination through original content and employs a systematic curation pipeline to eliminate flawed items. Evaluations show that PHYBench activates more tokens and provides stronger differentiation between reasoning models compared to other baselines like AIME 2024, OlympiadBench and GPQA. Even the best-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, achieves only 36.9% accuracy compared to human experts' 61.9%. To further enhance evaluation precision, we introduce the Expression Edit Distance (EED) Score for mathematical expression assessment, which improves sample efficiency by 204% over binary scoring. Moreover, PHYBench effectively elicits multi-step and multi-condition reasoning, providing a platform for examining models' reasoning robustness, preferences, and deficiencies. The benchmark results and dataset are publicly available at https://www.phybench.cn/.

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Shi Qiu, Shaoyang Guo, Zhuo-Yang Song, Yunbo Sun, Zeyu Cai, Jiashen Wei, Tianyu Luo, Yixuan Yin, Haoxu Zhang, Yi Hu, Chenyang Wang, Chencheng Tang, Haoling Chang, Qi Liu, Ziheng Zhou, Tianyu Zhang, Jingtian Zhang, Zhangyi Liu, Minghao Li, Yuku Zhang, Boxuan Jing, Xianqi Yin, Yutong Ren, Zizhuo Fu, Jiaming Ji, Weike Wang, Xudong Tian, Anqi Lv, Laifu Man, Jianxiang Li, Feiyu Tao, Qihua Sun, Zhou Liang, Yushu Mu, Zhongxuan Li, Jing-Jun Zhang, Shutao Zhang, Xiaotian Li, Xingqi Xia, Jiawei Lin, Zheyu Shen, Jiahang Chen, Qiuhao Xiong, Binran Wang, Fengyuan Wang, Ziyang Ni, Bohan Zhang, Fan Cui, Changkun Shao, Qing-Hong Cao, Ming-xing Luo, Yaodong Yang, Muhan Zhang, Hua Xing Zhu. 2025-05-18. PHYBench: Holistic Evaluation of Physical Perception and Reasoning in Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16074

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