Papers › FEABench: Evaluating Language Models on Multiphysics Reasoning Ability

FEABench: Evaluating Language Models on Multiphysics Reasoning Ability

8 Apr 2025arXiv:2504.06260archive 2025-07-28

Nayantara Mudur, HAO CUI, Subhashini Venugopalan, Paul Raccuglia, Michael P. Brenner, Peter Norgaard

Building precise simulations of the real world and invoking numerical solvers to answer quantitative problems is an essential requirement in engineering and science. We present FEABench, a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) and LLM agents to simulate and solve physics, mathematics and engineering problems using finite element analysis (FEA). We introduce a comprehensive evaluation scheme to investigate the ability of LLMs to solve these problems end-to-end by reasoning over natural language problem descriptions and operating COMSOL Multiphysics$^\circledR$, an FEA software, to compute the answers. We additionally design a language model agent equipped with the ability to interact with the software through its Application Programming Interface (API), examine its outputs and use tools to improve its solutions over multiple iterations. Our best performing strategy generates executable API calls 88% of the time. LLMs that can successfully interact with and operate FEA software to solve problems such as those in our benchmark would push the frontiers of automation in engineering. Acquiring this capability would augment LLMs' reasoning skills with the precision of numerical solvers and advance the development of autonomous systems that can tackle complex problems in the real world. The code is available at https://github.com/google/feabench

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call_function_with_retry google/feabench/retry_lib.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · ed781a24882efe4e · report
compactify_java google/feabench/parse_java_api.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 3c7c5b9ae36a8255 · report
diff_score google/feabench/common/eval/api_score.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 9e9a06f31482e563 · report
get_default_gemini_external_model_config google/feabench/common/llm_client_builder.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 0890377be68a2e7c · report
get_problem_description_for_task_version google/feabench/common/prompt_generation.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 9c5ce7b2768db975 · report
model_tree_diff google/feabench/common/eval/api_score.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 608a24fdd2354dff · report
parse_java google/feabench/generate_feabench_large/parse_tutorial_code.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4255f03f1cc60af1 · report
pythonize_java_api google/feabench/parse_java_api.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b4d1ea1081fc8176 · report
replace_in_prompt google/feabench/common/prompt_generation.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · c81a30deb72f981e · report
retry_wrapper google/feabench/common/llm_client_builder.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f647063765ee8260 · report
separate_run_method_body google/feabench/parse_java_api.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · d8af8971c6b7c8c8 · report
specify_prompt_template google/feabench/common/prompt_generation.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · eddecaba92735bbe · report
split_string_by_delimiter google/feabench/common_parsing_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e05671e1181ec77d · report

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