SeePhys Pro: Diagnosing Modality Transfer and Blind-Training Effects in Multimodal RLVR for Physics Reasoning

We introduce SeePhys Pro, a fine-grained modality transfer benchmark that studies whether models preserve the same reasoning capability when critical information is progressively transferred from text to image. Unlike standard vision-essential benchmarks that evaluate a single input form, SeePhys Pro features four semantically aligned variants for each problem with progressively increasing visual elements. Our evaluation shows that current frontier models are far from representation-invariant reasoners: performance degrades on average as information moves from language to diagrams, with visual variable grounding as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this inference-time fragility, we further develop large training corpora for multimodal RLVR and use blind training as a diagnostic control, finding that RL with all training images masked can still improve performance on unmasked validation sets. To analyze this effect, text-deletion, image-mask-rate, and format-saturation controls suggest that such gains can arise from residual textual and distributional cues rather than valid visual evidence. Our results highlight the need to evaluate multimodal reasoning not only by final-answer accuracy, but also by robustness under modality transfer and by diagnostics that test whether improvements rely on task-critical visual evidence.

Aligning Perception, Reasoning, Modeling and Interaction: A Survey on Physical AI

The rapid advancement of embodied intelligence and world models has intensified efforts to integrate physical laws into AI systems, yet physical perception and symbolic physics reasoning have developed along separate trajectories without a unified bridging framework. This work provides a comprehensive overview of physical AI, establishing clear distinctions between theoretical physics reasoning and applied physical understanding while systematically examining how physics-grounded methods enhance AI's real-world comprehension across structured symbolic reasoning, embodied systems, and generative models. Through rigorous analysis of recent advances, we advocate for intelligent systems that ground learning in both physical principles and embodied reasoning processes, transcending pattern recognition toward genuine understanding of physical laws. Our synthesis envisions next-generation world models capable of explaining physical phenomena and predicting future states, advancing safe, generalizable, and interpretable AI systems. We maintain a continuously updated resource at https://github.com/AI4Phys/Awesome-AI-for-Physics.