Physics-R1 C
AI benchmark · Reasoning
Full listing name: Physics-R1: An Audited Olympiad Corpus and Recipe for Visual Physics Reasoning
What is Physics-R1?
We audit the multimodal-physics evaluation pipeline end-to-end and document three undetected construction practices that distort how the field measures vision-language reasoning: train-eval contamination, translation drift, and MCQ saturation. (1) Public training pools (UGPhysics-Train, SciInstruct, MMK12) pass single-stage 5-gram-Jaccard audits with zero hits across all six public physics evals; a three-stage audit (Jaccard -> mxbai-embed-large cosine -> Haiku-4.5 LLM-judge) surfaces 134 near-duplicates and 4,846 paraphrase candidates in SciInstruct alone. (2) A 17-pp Sonnet 4.5 delta on 59 paired Estonian-English olympiad problems (30.5% vs. 13.6%; sign test p=0.011, McNemar p=0.021, paired bootstrap 95% CI [+5.1, +28.9] pp). (3) A 46-pp format-and-novelty gradient on identical Sonnet weights between MCQ (79.7% on PhyX) and open-ended olympiad evaluation (33.4% on PhysOlym-A). We release four artifacts addressing these gaps: PhysCorp-A (6,432-record three-stage-audited multimodal corpus), PhysR1Corp (2,268-record closed-form RL pool), PhysOlym-A (500-problem, 99.8% novel-source held-out olympiad eval with native difficulty labels and an EN/ET bilingual subset), and Physics-R1, a reference GSPO+DAPO recipe cold-started from Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking. Across 3 seeds, Physics-R1 lifts the audited corpus over the 8B base by +18.3 pp on PhysOlym-A liberal (8.0 -> 26.3 +/- 1.7; 7.1 pp behind Sonnet 4.5), +15.7 pp on PhysReason (23.9 -> 39.6 +/- 6.4; ahead of Qwen3-VL-32B and Gemini 2.5 Pro), +6.9 pp on OlympiadBench-Physics (46.2 +/- 1.5), and +4.1 pp on PhyX MCQ (77.8 +/- 0.3).
Tier C
Niche: a handful of models scored, or built by an RL vendor.
How much stands behind a tier: usage, who backs it, a confirmed line from its own site or paper, and a clear read on X. High with three of the four, medium with two, low otherwise.
- 9 models scored
- in curated RL directories (1 pt)
How we got to tier C
- Adoption: 9 models scored. Tier C.
- Not yet read on X.
- In curated RL directories: 1 point, a floor of none.
- Not yet confirmed by a line from its own site or paper.
A clear view on X moves a tier one step up or down; most entries don't move. How tiers work.
Not on the map yet: no line from its own site or paper places it in a domain.
Next: browse all benchmarks. Entry from the RL Research daily scrape of public sources, 2026-10-11 snapshot.