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PhysVista evaluates physical intelligence in VLMs by closing the perception-reasoning-assessment loop, addressing fragmented existing benchmarks that overlook the synergy between these stages. The benchmark jointly assesses physical state perception, dynamics reasoning, and plausibility assessment across real-world and AI-generated videos, distinguishing event- and scale-level reasoning. Experiments reveal significant limitations in VLMs' physical reasoning and plausibility assessment, indicating a gap between visual recognition and true physical understanding.
VLMs struggle to assess physical plausibility, failing to bridge visual recognition with genuine physical understanding even when perception and reasoning are intact.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet whether they truly capture the physical consistency underlying real-world dynamics remains unclear. Existing benchmark paradigms often suffer from fragmented evaluation, focusing on isolated cognitive stages while overlooking the inherent synergy between perception, reasoning, and physical judgment. The lack of a holistic perspective limits the ability to diagnose whether VLMs can reliably evaluate the physical authenticity of emerging generative models. To address these issues, we introduce PhysVista, a benchmark designed to evaluate physical intelligence in VLMs through a closed cognitive loop framework inspired by the human seeing-reasoning-assessment process. PhysVista restores this loop by jointly evaluating physical state perception, physical dynamics reasoning, and physical plausibility assessment. It further distinguishes event-level reasoning and scale-level reasoning to enable fine-grained analysis of physical understanding. In addition, PhysVista incorporates both real-world and AI-generated videos, allowing evaluation across diverse domains and emerging generative scenarios. Extensive experiments across a diverse set of VLMs reveal substantial limitations in physical reasoning and plausibility assessment, highlighting a persistent gap between visual recognition and genuine physical understanding, and pointing toward more principled designs for physically grounded multimodal intelligence.
