Learning physics from dynamical scenes
Tomer Ullman1 (tomeru@mit.edu), Andreas Stuhlmüller2 (ast@mit.edu), Noah Goodman2(ngoodman@stanford.edu), & Joshua Tenenbaum1 (jbt@mit.edu)
1 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 2 Department of Psychology, Stanford University
Abstract
Humans acquire their most basic physical concepts early indevelopment, but continue to enrich and expand their intuitive physics throughout life as they are exposed to more andvaried dynamical environments. We introduce a hierarchical
Bayesian framework to explain how people can learn physical theories across multiple timescales and levels of abstraction. In contrast to previous Bayesian models of theory acquisition (Tenenbaum, Kemp, Griffiths, & Goodman, 2011), we
work with more expressive probabilistic program representations suitable for learning the forces and properties that govern
how objects interact in dynamic scenes unfolding over time.
We compare our model and human learners on a challenging task of inferring novel physical laws in microworlds given
short movies. People are generally able to perform this task
and behave in line with model predictions. Yet they also makesystematic errors suggestive of how a top-down Bayesian approach to learning might be complemented by a more bottomup feature-based approximate inference scheme, to best explain theory learning at an algorithmic level.
Keywords: theory learning; intuitive physics; probabilistic inference; physical reasoning

Introduction
People regularly reason about the physical properties of theworld around them. Glancing at a book on a table, we canrapidly tell if it is about to fall, how it will slide if pushed,tumble if it falls on a hard floor, sag if pressured, bend if
bent. This ability for physical scene understanding begins todevelop in infancy, and is suggested as a core component of
human cognitive architecture (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007).
While some aspects of this capacity are likely innate (Baillargeon, 2002), learning also occurs at multiple levels from
infancy into adulthood. Infants develop notions of containment, stability, and gravitational force over the first few
months of life (Baillargeon, 2002). With exposure, young
children acquire an intuitive understanding of remote controls
and magnets. Most young children and adults quickly adjust
to the ’unnatural physics’ of many video games, and astronauts can learn to adjust to weightless environments.
How, in principle, can people learn intuitive physics fromexperience? How can they grasp structure at multiple levels,
ranging from deep enduring laws acquired early in infancy
to the wide spectrum of novel and unfamiliar dynamics that
adults encounter and can adapt to? How much data are required, and how are the data brought to bear on candidate
theory hypotheses? These are the questions we ask here.
We take as a starting point the computational-level viewof theory learning as rational statistical inference over hierarchies of structured representations (Tenenbaum et al., 2011).
Previous work in this tradition focused on relatively spare andstatic logical descriptions of theories and data; for example,
a law of magnetism might be represented as ‘if magnet(x)and magnet(y) then attract(x,y)’, and the learner’s data might

Figure 1:
Illustrationof the domain exploredin this paper, showing
the motion and interaction of four different
pucks moving on a
two-dimensional plane
governed by latent
physical properties anddynamical laws, suchas mass, friction, global
and pairwise forces.

consist of propositions such as ‘attracts(ob jecta , ob jectb )’(Kemp, Tenenbaum, Niyogi, & Griffiths, 2010). Here we
adopt a more expressive representational framework suitable
for learning the force laws and latent properties governing
how objects move and interact with each other, given observations of scenes unfolding dynamically over time. We compare the performance of an ideal Bayesian learner who canrepresent dynamical laws and properties with the behavior ofhuman learners asked to infer the novel physics of various microworlds from short movies (e.g., the snapshot shown in Fig.
1). While people are generally able to perform this challenging task, they also make systematic errors which are suggestive of how they might use feature-based inference schemes
to approximate ideal Bayesian inference.

Formalizing theory learning
The core of our formal treatment is a hierarchical probabilistic generative model for theories (Kemp et al., 2010; Ullman,
Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2012), specialized to the setting of
intuitive physical theories (Fig.2). The hierarchy consists ofseveral levels, with more concrete (lower-level) concepts being generated from more abstract versions in the level above,and ultimately bottoming out in data that take the form of dynamic motion stimuli. Generative knowledge at each levelis represented formally using (define ...) statements in
Church, a probabilistic programming language (Goodman,
Mansinghka, Roy, Bonawitz, & Tenenbaum, 2008).
Probabilistic programs are useful for representing knowledge with uncertainty (e.g. Stuhlmüller & Goodman, 2013).
Fig. 2(iii) shows examples of probabilistic definition statements within our domain of intuitive physics, using Church.
Fig. 2(i) shows the levels associated with these statements.
The arrows from one level to the next represent how eachlevel is sampled from the definitions and associated probability distributions of the level above it.
It is not possible to fully detail the technical aspects ofthe model in the space provided, and so we provide a general overview. The model is a hierarchy of levels from N(framework level) to 0 (observed data). The top-most level N

(i)!

(ii)!

(iii)!

Level N !
Innate !
concepts!

Entity!

(define (make-entity property1 property2 … )(list property1 property2 … ))Newtonian !
Dynamics!

(define (run-dynamics entities forces
init-cond steps dt)(if (= steps 0) ‘()(let* ((m (get-mass entities))(F (apply-forces forces entities))(a (/ F m))(new-cond (integrate init-conda dt noise)))(pair new-cond (run-dynamics entities
forces new-cond (- 1 step) dt)))))

Puck:!

(define puck (make-entity
pos shape mass vel … ))Surface:!

(define surface (make-entity
pos shape friction … ))Mass!

(define (mass)(pair “mass” (uniform ’ (1 3 9))))Friction!

(define (friction)(pair “friction” ’ (uniform ’ (0 5 20))))Level 2!
Entity types!

Properties!

Force classes! Pairwise:!

1!

2!

Global:!

(define (pairwise-force c1 c2)(let* ((a (uniform-draw ’ (-1 0 1))))(lambda (o1 o2)(let ((r (euc-dist o1 o2)))(/ (* a del(o1,col(o1)) del(o2,col(o2)))(power r 2))))))(define (global-force)(let* ((d (uniform-draw compass-dir)))(lambda (o) (* k d))))Level 1 !
Property !
values!

Force !
parameters!

Level 0 (data)!

: large mass!
: medium mass!
: small mass!
: high friction!
: no friction!

(define world-entities(map sample-values entity-list))

Force b/w reds: attract! (define world-forces(map sample-parameters force-list)

Initial conditions!

(define scenario(let* (
(init-cond (sample-init world-entities)))(run-dynamics world-entities
world-forces init-cond steps dt)))

Figure 2: Formal framework for learning intuitive physics in different domains: (i) The general hierarchy going from abstract principles and assumptions to observable data. The top-most level of thehierarchy assumes a general noisy-Newtonian dynamics. (ii) Applying the principles in the left-most column to the particular domain
illustrated by Fig. 1 (iii) Definition statements in Church, capturing
the notions shown in the middle column with a probabilistic programming language.

represents general framework knowledge (Wellman & Gelman, 1992) and expectations about physical domains. The
concepts in this level include entities, which are a collectionof properties, and forces, which are functions of properties
and govern how these properties change over time. Forces
can be fields that apply uniformly in space and time, such as
gravity, or can be event-based, such as the force impulses exerted between two objects during a collision. Properties are
named values or distributions over values. Properties such as
location and shape are privileged - it is assumed all entities
have them. Mass is another privileged property - it is assumed
all dynamic entities (those that can potentially move) have it.
Dynamic entities correspond then to the common definitionof matter as ‘a thing with mass that occupies space’.
The framework level defines a ‘Newtonian-like’ dynamics, consistent with suggestions from several recent studies of
intuitive physical reasoning in adults (e.g. Battaglia, Hamrick, & Tenenbaum, 2013; Sanborn, Mansinghka, & Griffiths,

2013) and infants (Téglás et al., 2011). As Sanborn et al.
(2013) show, such a ‘noisy-Newtonian’ representation of intuitive physics can account for previous findings in dynamical
perception that have supported a heuristic account of physicalreasoning (Gilden & Proffitt, 1989; Todd & Warren, 1982), or
direct perception models (e.g. Andersson & Runeson, 2008).
Descending from Level N to Level 0, concepts are increasingly grounded by sampling from the concepts and associatedprobability distributions of the level above Fig. 2(i)). Eachlevel in the hierarchy can spawn a large number of instantiations in the level below it. Each lower level of the hierarchy
details the types of possible entities, properties and forces in
it. All members of an entity type share properties, and aregoverned by the same types of forces. A force type specifies the number and types of entities it acts on, and how theirrelevant properties change over time.
Space of learnable theories. Levels 0-2 in Fig. 2 capture
the specific sub-domain of intuitive physics we study in thispaper’s experiments: two-dimensional discs moving over various surfaces, generating and affected by various forces, colliding elastically with each other and with barriers bounding
the environment (cf Fig. 1).
Levels 0-2 represent the minimal framework needed to explain behavior in our task and we remain agnostic about more
abstract background knowledge that might also be brought tobear. We give participants explicit instructions that effectively
determine a single Level 2 schema for the task, which generates a large hypothesis space of candidate Level 1 theories,
which they are asked to infer by using observed data at Level
0.
Level 2: The “hockey-puck” domain. This level specifies
the entity types puck and surface. All entities within the type
puck have the properties mass, elasticity, color, shape, position, and velocity. Level 2 also specifies two types of force:
Pairwise forces cause pucks to attract or repel, following the’inverse square distance’ form of Newton’s gravitation law
and Coulomb’s Law. Global forces push all pucks in a single
compass direction. We assume forces of collision and frictionthat follow their standard forms, but they are not the subjectof inference here.
Level 1: Specific theories. The hockey-puck domain canbe instantiated as many different specific theories, each describing the dynamics of a different possible world in this domain. A Level 1 theory is determined by sampling particularvalues for all free parameters in the force types, and for all
entity subtypes and their subtype properties (e.g., masses ofpucks, friction coefficients of surfaces). Each of the sampledvalues is drawn from a probability distribution that the Level
2 theory specifies. So, Level 2 generates a prior distribution
over candidate theories for possible worlds in its domain.
The domain we study here allows three types of pucks,
indexed by the colors red, blue and yellow. It allows three
types of surfaces (other than the default blank surface), indexed by the colors brown, green and purple. Puck mass
values are 1, 3, or 9, drawn with equal probability. Surface

(a)

(b)
probability

The model described so far allows us to formalize different
kinds of learning as inference over different levels of the hierarchy. This approach can in principle be used for reasoning
about all levels of the hierarchy, including the general shapeof forces and types of entities, the unobserved physical properties of entities, as well as the existence, shape and parameters of unseen dynamical rules. In this paper, we specificallyconsider inference over the properties of mass and friction,and the existence and direction of pairwise and global forces.
We do this by inverting the generative framework to obtain
the posterior over all possible theories that could have produced the observed data. We then marginalize out irrelevant
aspects of the theory to obtain posterior probabilities over the
dynamic quantity of of interest (Fig.3a and b).

(c)

(d)
Actual mean pairwise
distance in the given
scenarioprobability

Theory learning as Bayesian inferenceThis psychological intuition suggests a principled wayof approximating the full inference, following a statisticalmethod known as Approximate Bayesian Computation (seeBlum, Nunes, Prangle, & Sisson, 2013, for a review). Thisapproach is similar to ‘indirect inference’ which assumes amodel that can generate simulated data d 0 given some parameters θ, but does not try to estimate θ directly from observed
data d. Rather, we first construct an auxiliary model with parameters β and an estimator β˜ that can be used to evaluate
both d and d 0 . The indirect estimate of the parameter of interest, θ̂, is then the parameter that generated the simulated
˜ 0 ) is as close as possible to thedata whose estimator value β(d˜estimator value of observed data, β(d).
Here we will use the following approximation: Our framework allows us to generate simulated object paths given physical parameters θ, which we then wish to estimate. We begin
by drawing simulated data for all the models within the domain over all scenarios, giving us several hundred thousand
paths. For every physical parameter θ we construct a set ofsummary statistics that can be evaluated on any given path,and act as estimators. For example, the summary statistic
avgPositionX(d) calculates the mean x-axis position of all
objects over a given path, and can be used as an estimator forthe existence of a global force along the x-axis. We evaluate these sufficient statistics for each of the parameter values
over all the paths, obtaining an empirical likelihood distribution which is smoothed with gaussian kernels. The estimatedlikelihood of a given parameter is then the likelihood of thesufficient statistic for the observed data (see Figure 3 for an
illustration of this process).

Likelihood

friction coefficients values are 0, 5 or 20, drawn with equal
probability. Different pairwise forces (attraction, repulsion,or no interaction) can act between each of the different pairsof puck types, drawn with equal prior probability. Finally,a global force may push all pucks in a given direction, either ↑, ↓, ←, → or 0, drawn with equal probability. We further restrict this space by considering only Level 1 theories
in which all subclasses differ in their latent properties (e.g.
blue, red and yellow pucks must all have different masses).
While this restriction (together with the discretization) limits
the otherwise-infinite space of theories, it is still a very large
space, containing 131,220 distinct theories.
Level 0: Observed data. The bottom level is a concrete
scenario, specified by the precise individual entities under observation and the initial conditions of their dynamically updated properties. Each Level 1 theory can be instantiated inmany different scenarios. The pucks’ initial conditions weredrawn from a zero-mean Gaussian distribution for positions
and a Gamma distribution for velocities. Once the entities andinitial conditions are set, the positions and velocities of allentities are updated according to the Level 1 theory’s specificforce dynamics for T time-steps, generating a path of multivalued data points, d0 , . . . , dT . The probability of a path issimply the product of the probabilities of all the choices used
to generate the scenario. Finally, the actual observed positions and velocities of all entities are assumed to be displaced
from their true values by Gaussian noise.

Simulation-based approximations
The inversion of the generative model is in principle sufficient for inference over any unknown quantity of interest in
it, and in our particular discretized domain we can explicitly
sum over all possible theories. However, integrating over thefull space of theories is generally intractable, and it is implausible that for any dynamic stimuli people perform massive inference over all possible models that could have generated it.
Also, people can use more than point-wise deviation between
expected paths to estimate physical parameters. For example,
if people think two objects attract they might expect that overtime the mean distance between the objects should shrink.

Average pairwise distance

Repel

None

Attract

Figure 3: Approximations and the ideal observer for pairwise forces.
For a given scenario (a), many alternate paths are generated andcompared to the observed path, giving a log likelihood for all theories. Posterior estimates are obtained by marginalizing over thetheories (b), or by comparing the summary statistics of the scenario
to its empirical distribution over many simulations done offline (c).
We also consider a simple linear combination of the methods (d).

Psychologically, this approximation means the following:people can imagine dynamical scenes unfolding over time,
but when reasoning about a specific scene they only computecertain summary statistics. People compare the values of theParticipants Three hundred participants from the US wererecruited via the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, and were
paid for their participation. Ten participants were excluded
from analysis for failing comprehension questions.
Stimuli 60 videos were used as stimuli, each one lasting 5
seconds and depicting several pucks moving and colliding.
We constructed the stimuli in the following manner: First,
we defined a set of 10 worlds that differ in the physical rules
underlying their dynamics, as well as in the properties of theobjects that appear in them. For example: in world1 blue
pucks have a large mass and there are no global or coupling
forces, whereas in world5 blue pucks are light and red pucks
repel one another. A full description of the underlying physical rules of each world is available at http://www.mit.edu/
˜tomeru/physics2014/underlyingRules.pdf
Next, for each world we created 6 different scenarios thatdiffer in their initial conditions (i.e. the starting location andvelocity of the pucks and surfaces), as well as the particular objects used and the size of the surfaces. For example:
the first scenario of world1 has red, yellow and blue pucks,
whereas the second scenario uses only red and yellow pucks.
The initial conditions were drawn from random distributions,and in practice most of the movies started with the pucks already moving in some arbitrary way.
Given the dynamical rules of the world and initial conditions, we unfolded the scenarios over 400 steps and created avideo detailing the motion of the objects over time 1 .
Procedure Each participant saw 5 videos drawn from theset of 60 possible stimuli. The video-participant pairing wasdone according to a Latin-square design, such that approximately thirty participants saw each video. The order of the 5videos was randomized for each participant.
Participants were informed what objects, forces and physical properties were potentially present across all the stimuli,
and that objects of the same color have the same properties.
Participants were instructed to think of the videos as similar
to ’hockey pucks moving over a smooth white table-top’.
1 All stimuli are available at http://www.mit.edu/ tomeru/

˜physics2014/stimuli/

True Mass

N

T

Ligh
t

Sm o
oth

h

0.59

0.32 0.07Rm

Peopleroug

0.32

0.53 0.11

A

Med
iu

roug
h

0.09

0.15 0.82

R

A

None
N

0.11 0.67 0.01 0.06 0.10

S

People0.65 0.19 0.16 0.03 0.16

0.08 0.01 0.78 0.06 0.04

W(b)

True Friction

N

True Pairwise

True Friction

0.08 0.07 0.03 0.75 0.04

E

Cumulative Probability

Very
A little

True Mass

Experiment

(c)

(a)
Hea
vy

Tra n s fo rm e d R a tin gsummary statistics in the specific scene to a repository which
was computed by imagining many possible scenes. These
repositories are built by using the same imagery capacity thatlets people imagine individual scenes evolving. For example,
people might watch a specific scene and compute how close
some pucks are on average (the summary statistic). People
then compare that value to a repository of average particle
distances. People can then conclude that the particles are
not attracting – because based on the repository of previous
scenes if the particles were attracting they should be closer
together on average.
We examine these various ways of physical reasoning, byconsidering people’s performance on a novel dynamical task.

0.08 0.06 0.01 0.09 0.66
None

N

S

W

True Global

E

Figure 4: Analysis of participant performance using: (a) Ordinal logistic regression for mass (left) and friction (right). Shaded black
areas represent uncertainty on parameter estimates, colored patches
show the ordinal responses. The downward trend indicates a greater
proportion of participants selecting the qualitatively correct response
as the quantitative value goes up, (b) Per scenario analysis withtransformed ratings for mass (left) and friction (right). Each black
dot represents the average rating of 25-30 participants. The solidline shows the average response across all scenarios. Dotted lines
connect mass/friction ratings in the same scenario, and so a risingline means a correct ranking. (c) Confusion matrices for pairwise
forces (top) and global forces (bottom).

After the presentation of each video participants rated
the entire set of possible physical properties. For example, for each puck color participants were asked how
massive are [color] pucks?, with possible answers being
heavy, medium or light. In some cases not all the questions were relevant (for example, a question about themass of the blue puck when no blue pucks are present),
in which case participants could answer “can’t tell fromvideo”. 13 questions per video, 5 videos per per participant means 65 data points per participant. An example
experiment is available at http://www.mit.edu/˜tomeru/
physics-experiment-turk/physics-experiment.html.

Participant Performance
Overview Participants correctly answered 53% of the questions on average, with a standard error of ∼ 13%.2
Participants’ quantitative performance was generally good
given the nature of the stimuli, and it differed depending on
the particular physical property being considered.
Analysis We analyzed the results in two ways:
Aggregating over the different scenarios: We obtained
the empirical distribution of responses over the possible answers across all scenarios. We collapsed across the property
of color to consider 4 physical properties: Mass, friction,
pairwise forces and global forces. For mass and friction properties the responses were clearly ordinal (light, medium, andheavy for mass; smooth, a little rough, and very rough for
friction) and the ground truth was a continuous ratio scale,so we can fit an ordinal logistic regression to the participants,
2 There was a small significant effect of learning over time, which
we do not account for explicitly in the analysis: 52% correct on first2 videos vs. 54% answers on last 2 videos.

shown in Fig. 4a. The figure displays the cumulative probability on the left y-axis, and the relevant response on the righty-axis. For example, on this regression the probability people
will answer ‘light’ when the true mass is in fact light (equal to1) is 52%. The probability they will answer ‘medium’ is 33%(85%-52%), and the probability that they will answer ‘heavy’is the remaining 15%. This is close to the empirical values of
47%/37%/16%.
An ordinal regression cannot be used for the global andcoupling forces, and so Fig. 4c shows empirical confusion
matrices, detailing the percentage of people which chose each
option given the ground truth.
Transforming responses per scenario For mass and friction we can assess performance in a more refined way, by
considering the distribution of responses for each puck (andsurface) in scenario, and transforming this distribution into
a quantitative prediction. We take the expectation of thephysical property relative to the empirical distribution (e.g.,
if 60% of participants rated a yellow puck in scenario 7 as‘heavy’ and 40% rated it as ’medium’, the converted rating is
0.6 ∗ 9 + 0.4 ∗ 3 = 6.6), and compare with the ground truth (Fig. 4b). We next consider each property separately:
1. Mass: The downward trend in Fig. 4a, shows that participants correctly shift in the probability of answering thata mass is heavier as it becomes heavier. The linear correlation in Fig. 4b shows that despite a large degree of variance for any given mass, participants were able to overallcorrectly scale the masses. The ability to correctly rank andquantitatively scale multiple masses is of interest, as experiments on inferring mass from collisions usually focused onjudgements of mass ratios for two masses, often requiring binary responses of ‘more/less massive’ (e.g. Gilden & Proffitt, 1989). 2. Friction: Again we see a downward trend in
the logistic regression, depicted in Fig. 4a. Compared withthe regression for the masses, participants lean more heavily
towards the lower end of the responses, perhaps because a‘null’ response (no friction) is easier to make than a graded
response along a continuum. The linear correlation depicted
in Fig. 4b shows that participants were also able to correctly
rank the roughness of the surfaces, though they could better
distinguish between high- and low-friction surfaces than they
were able to distinguish low- and zero-friction surfaces. To
our knowledge this is the first systematic study of people’s
ranking of the friction properties of surfaces in the intuitive
physics literature. 3. Pairwise forces: As shown in Fig. 4cparticipants performed well on attraction forces, correctly detecting them on average in 82% of the cases in which they existed, while not reporting them on average in 88% of the cases
in which they did not exist. As for repulsion and non-forces,
their performance was above chance, although it was significantly worse than attraction. Note in particular that there isan asymmetry in the column for non-forces, indicating participants are confusing repulsion and non-existent forces, much
more than they are confusing attraction and non-forces (32%
vs. 15%). 4. Global forces: As shown in Fig. 4c participants

performed relatively well on detecting global forces, identifying the correct global force 70% of the time on average. Notethat generally any force is more likely to be confused with thenull-force case than it is with any specific force.

Comparison to different models
For the Ideal Observer model (IO), we get predictions in thefollowing way: For each scenario, we fix the observed initialconditions and simulate the resulting paths under all parameter hypotheses. We then score each model by assessing thedeviation of its simulated path from the observed path. Finally, for each parameter of interest we marginalize over theother parameters, to obtain a log-likelihood score for the relevant parameter (see Fig. 3a and b). For the Simulation BasedApproximation model (SBA), we get predictions by following the procedure detailed at the end of the formal modelingsection. We also consider a combination of these two approaches, linearly summing weighted likelihoods from both
approaches for any given physical parameters. These various
approaches are illustrated for a particular example in (see Fig.
3). All models are fit to participant data by uniformly scaling
their predictions using a noise parameter β, optimizing forroot-mean-square-error (RMSE).
We begin our comparison by collapsing across scenarios
to compare with the logistic regressions and confusion matrices shown in Fig. 4. For mass inference, the SBA model
outperforms the IO model and is quite close to people’s performance. The combined IO&SBA model places its entire
weight on the SBA model. For friction, the SBA model outperforms the IO model, although the combined IO&SBA outperforms both (Fig.5a). For the confusion matrices we measured fit using RMSE. For pairwise forces, people showeda particular asymmetry when they incorrectly judge a nullforce, mistaking it more often for a repulsive force than an
attractive one (Fig. 4b). We can understand this difference
intuitively – attraction pulls bodies together which provides
even further evidence for attraction over time, while repulsion
pushes bodies apart and becomes weaker, providing less evidence for itself over time. Such an asymmetry plays out overthe entire scene, and does not come naturally out of the IO
model, which sums up error across local deviations. By contrast, a summary statistic measuring the average pairwise distance does replicate this asymmetry. The combined IO&SBA
is the closest to that of people in terms of RMSE (Fig. 5b).
For global forces, people were confused between any given
force and the absence of force, relative to any other force.
Both the IO and SBA models replicate this finding, although
the IO model is closer to people. Also, the SBA model isquite bad at detecting the absence of global forces, perhaps
because there is no simple feature to account for a null-force.
Again, the combination IO&SBA produces a confusion matrix which is closest to that of people (Fig. 5c).
We also considered the correlation between people and themodels for each scenario, for each object and property, without refitting the noise parameter. We found that for mostphysical properties the combined model’s results were equalCumulative Probability(a)True Mass
RMSE = 0.33

SBA

IO&SBA

True Friction
RMSE = 0.21

RMSE = 0.19

Model

(b)

IO

PeopleTrue Pairwise
RMSE = 0.21

RMSE = 0.35

RMSE = 0.19

Model

(c)

small space of ‘reasonable’ theories and then use Bayesianinference on this smaller space.
There are many questions that are still open when considering the challenge of inferring physical dynamics from perceptual scenes. For example, to what extent are the computational processes underlying intuitive physics shared between
adults and children? While some physical knowledge develops over time, it is possible that a basic understanding of entities, forces and dynamics, is innate. Our experiments focusedon adults, but one advantage of our novel stimuli is that they
can be easily adapted to experiments with young children or
infants, using simple responses or violation-of-expectation toindicate what they learn from brief exposures.
The combination of hierarchical Bayesian learning, an expressive representation for dynamical theories in terms ofprobabilistic programs, and psychologically plausible approximate inference schemes offers a powerful paradigm formodeling the content and acquisition of a broad swath of human intuitive physics.
Acknowledgments This material is based on work supported by
the Center for Minds, Brains and Machines (CBMM), funded by
NSF STC award CCF-1231216, and ONR grant N00014-13-1-0333.

References

True Global

Figure 5: Comparison of model performance for properties (a) friction and mass (b) pairwise forces and (c) global forces.

to or slightly better than the individual models. For the pairwise forces there was a significant gain, with the correlation
for IO&SBA being 0.81, while the SBA model and IO model
had correlations of 0.75 and 0.56 respectively.

General discussion
We found that a hybrid between top-down Bayesian learning and bottom-up feature-based heuristic inference emerged
as the best empirical fit to participants’ behavior in learning
physical laws from dynamic scenes. This general approachmakes good engineering sense: It can transcend inherent limitations of each component method and serve as the basis formore robust real-world learning. The ideal Bayesian observeruses evidence in an optimal way, but it is computationally intractable. The feature-based statistics are a useful heuristic
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