Yanrui Wu
2025
PhysReason: A Comprehensive Benchmark towards Physics-Based Reasoning
Xinyu Zhang
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Yuxuan Dong
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Yanrui Wu
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Jiaxing Huang
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Chengyou Jia
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Basura Fernando
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Mike Zheng Shou
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Lingling Zhang
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Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities across various domains, especially mathematics and logic reasoning. However, current evaluations overlook physics-based reasoning - a complex task requiring physics theorems and constraints. We present PhysReason, a 1,200-problem benchmark comprising knowledge-based (25%) and reasoning-based (75%) problems, where the latter are divided into three difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard). Notably, problems require an average of 8.1 solution steps, with hard requiring 15.6, reflecting the complexity of physics-based reasoning. We propose the Physics Solution Auto Scoring Framework, incorporating efficient answer-level and comprehensive step-level evaluations. Top-performing models like Deepseek-R1, Gemini-2.0-Flash-Thinking, and o3-mini-high achieve less than 60% on answer-level evaluation, with performance dropping from knowledge questions (75.11%) to hard problems (31.95%). Through step-level evaluation, we identified four key bottlenecks: Physics Theorem Application, Physics Process Understanding, Calculation, and Physics Condition Analysis. These findings position PhysReason as a novel and comprehensive benchmark for evaluating physics-based reasoning capabilities in large language models.
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