PhysGym: Benchmarking LLMs in Interactive Physics Discovery with
  Controlled Priors
Authors: name: Yimeng Chen; name: Piotr Piȩkos; name: Mateusz Ostaszewski; name: Firas Laakom; name: Jürgen Schmidhuber
Published: 2025-07-21 12:28:10

Abstract: Evaluating the scientific discovery capabilities of large language model
based agents, particularly how they cope with varying environmental complexity
and utilize prior knowledge, requires specialized benchmarks currently lacking
in the landscape. To address this gap, we introduce PhysGym, a novel benchmark
suite and simulation platform for rigorously assessing LLM-based scientific
reasoning in interactive physics environments. PhysGym's primary contribution
lies in its sophisticated control over the level of prior knowledge provided to
the agent. This allows researchers to dissect agent performance along axes
including the complexity of the problem and the prior knowledge levels. The
benchmark comprises a suite of interactive simulations, where agents must
actively probe environments, gather data sequentially under constraints and
formulate hypotheses about underlying physical laws. PhysGym provides
standardized evaluation protocols and metrics for assessing hypothesis accuracy
and model fidelity. We demonstrate the benchmark's utility by presenting
results from baseline LLMs, showcasing its ability to differentiate
capabilities based on varying priors and task complexity.