Paper Detail

Apple-π: Benchmarking Thinking with Video Towards Law-Grounded Physical Intelligence

Runmao Yao, Kairui Hu, Yukang Cao, Ruisi Wang, Shulin Tian, Ziang Cao, Weichen Fan, Ziqi Huang, Yuhao Dong, Hao Li, Zhaoxi Chen, Zhongang Cai, Lei Yang, Ziwei Liu

huggingface Score 11.4

Published 2026-07-17 · First seen 2026-07-21

General AI

Abstract

Modern video generation models are increasingly hailed as emerging world models with an internalized grasp of physical law. Yet existing benchmarks largely evaluate physical plausibility only at the output level, without verifying whether the model arrives there through a faithful, law-grounded reasoning process. We introduce Apple-PI, the first benchmark that anchors video-model evaluation explicitly in physical laws. Apple-PI comprises three components. 1) Orchard: a dataset of 400 videos covering ten canonical tasks in classical mechanics. It separates single-law tasks for confounder-free diagnosis from multi-law tasks for probing generalization. 2) Benchmark Protocol: a three-stage protocol based on scientific reasoning, including Perception, Formulation, and Deduction. It uses chain-of-frames prompting on infographic-annotated first frames, treating the generated video as the model's visible reasoning trace. 3) Evaluation Suite: a hybrid evaluation suite that combines MLLM-based subjective scoring with physics-law-grounded objective measures. This enables stage-resolved diagnosis of not only whether a model fails, but where it fails. Benchmarking 11 models shows that current video models remain far from reliable law-grounded world simulators, with the best video model scoring only 0.473. Our stage-, pillar-, and source-resolved analyses further expose a Perception-to-Formulation-to-Deduction bottleneck, weak multi-law state transfer, and a persistent Sim-to-Real gap. These findings position Apple-PI as a diagnostic foundation for guiding future video models toward world models with law-grounded physical intelligence.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@misc{yao2026apple,
  title = {Apple-π: Benchmarking Thinking with Video Towards Law-Grounded Physical Intelligence},
  author = {Runmao Yao and Kairui Hu and Yukang Cao and Ruisi Wang and Shulin Tian and Ziang Cao and Weichen Fan and Ziqi Huang and Yuhao Dong and Hao Li and Zhaoxi Chen and Zhongang Cai and Lei Yang and Ziwei Liu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Modern video generation models are increasingly hailed as emerging world models with an internalized grasp of physical law. Yet existing benchmarks largely evaluate physical plausibility only at the output level, without verifying whether the model arrives there through a faithful, law-grounded reasoning process. We introduce Apple-PI, the first benchmark that anchors video-model evaluation explicitly in physical laws. Apple-PI comprises three components. 1) Orchard: a dataset of 400 videos cove},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2607.16401},
  keywords = {code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2607.16401},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}