Papers › Physical Reasoning Using Dynamics-Aware Models

Physical Reasoning Using Dynamics-Aware Models

20 Feb 2021arXiv:2102.10336archive 2025-07-28

Eltayeb Ahmed, Anton Bakhtin, Laurens van der Maaten, Rohit Girdhar

A common approach to solving physical reasoning tasks is to train a value learner on example tasks. A limitation of such an approach is that it requires learning about object dynamics solely from reward values assigned to the final state of a rollout of the environment. This study aims to address this limitation by augmenting the reward value with self-supervised signals about object dynamics. Specifically, we train the model to characterize the similarity of two environment rollouts, jointly with predicting the outcome of the reasoning task. This similarity can be defined as a distance measure between the trajectory of objects in the two rollouts, or learned directly from pixels using a contrastive formulation. Empirically, we find that this approach leads to substantial performance improvements on the PHYRE benchmark for physical reasoning (Bakhtin et al., 2019), establishing a new state-of-the-art.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections