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Main Authors: Zhang, Mingyu, Zhuo, Lifeng, Tan, Tianxi, Xie, Guocan, Nie, Xian, Li, Yan, Zhao, Renjie, He, Zizhu, Wang, Ziyu, Cai, Jiting, Li, Yong-Lu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15407
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author Zhang, Mingyu
Zhuo, Lifeng
Tan, Tianxi
Xie, Guocan
Nie, Xian
Li, Yan
Zhao, Renjie
He, Zizhu
Wang, Ziyu
Cai, Jiting
Li, Yong-Lu
author_facet Zhang, Mingyu
Zhuo, Lifeng
Tan, Tianxi
Xie, Guocan
Nie, Xian
Li, Yan
Zhao, Renjie
He, Zizhu
Wang, Ziyu
Cai, Jiting
Li, Yong-Lu
contents Humans learn by observing, interacting with environments, and internalizing physics and causality. Here, we aim to ask whether an agent can similarly acquire human-like reasoning from interaction and keep improving with more experience. To study this, we introduce a Game-to-Unseen (G2U) benchmark of 1,000+ heterogeneous games that exhibit significant visual domain gaps. Existing approaches, including VLMs and world models, struggle to capture underlying physics and causality since they are not focused on core mechanisms and overfit to visual details. VLM/VLA agents reason but lack look-ahead in interactive settings, while world models imagine but imitate visual patterns rather than analyze physics and causality. We therefore propose IPR (Interactive Physical Reasoner), using world-model rollouts to score and reinforce a VLM's policy, and introduce PhysCode, a physics-centric action code aligning semantic intent with dynamics to provide a shared action space for prediction and reasoning. Pretrained on 1,000+ games, our IPR performs robustly on levels from primitive intuition to goal-driven reasoning, and even surpasses GPT-5 overall. We find that performance improves with more training games and interaction steps, and that the model also zero-shot transfers to unseen games. These results support physics-centric interaction as a path to steadily improving physical reasoning. Further demos and project details can be found at https://mybearyzhang.github.io/ipr-1.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15407
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IPR-1: Interactive Physical Reasoner
Zhang, Mingyu
Zhuo, Lifeng
Tan, Tianxi
Xie, Guocan
Nie, Xian
Li, Yan
Zhao, Renjie
He, Zizhu
Wang, Ziyu
Cai, Jiting
Li, Yong-Lu
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Humans learn by observing, interacting with environments, and internalizing physics and causality. Here, we aim to ask whether an agent can similarly acquire human-like reasoning from interaction and keep improving with more experience. To study this, we introduce a Game-to-Unseen (G2U) benchmark of 1,000+ heterogeneous games that exhibit significant visual domain gaps. Existing approaches, including VLMs and world models, struggle to capture underlying physics and causality since they are not focused on core mechanisms and overfit to visual details. VLM/VLA agents reason but lack look-ahead in interactive settings, while world models imagine but imitate visual patterns rather than analyze physics and causality. We therefore propose IPR (Interactive Physical Reasoner), using world-model rollouts to score and reinforce a VLM's policy, and introduce PhysCode, a physics-centric action code aligning semantic intent with dynamics to provide a shared action space for prediction and reasoning. Pretrained on 1,000+ games, our IPR performs robustly on levels from primitive intuition to goal-driven reasoning, and even surpasses GPT-5 overall. We find that performance improves with more training games and interaction steps, and that the model also zero-shot transfers to unseen games. These results support physics-centric interaction as a path to steadily improving physical reasoning. Further demos and project details can be found at https://mybearyzhang.github.io/ipr-1.
title IPR-1: Interactive Physical Reasoner
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15407