Scaling Physical Reasoning with the PHYSICS Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces PHYSICS, a comprehensive dataset of 16,568 physics problems across multiple domains and difficulty levels, designed to evaluate and improve large language models' physical reasoning capabilities.

Contribution

The paper presents a new high-quality physics dataset with curated problems and reasoning paths, along with a tailored evaluation framework to assess LLMs' physics reasoning skills.

Findings

Current models show limitations in physics reasoning tasks.

The dataset enables better training and evaluation of physics understanding in LLMs.

Evaluation biases in existing frameworks are identified and addressed.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on advanced reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding competitions. Meanwhile, physics, despite being both reasoning-intensive and essential to real-world understanding, received limited academic and industrial attention. This paper introduces PHYSICS, a dataset containing 16,568 high-quality physics problems spanning subjects and difficulty levels, to facilitate this issue. Specifically, PHYSICS is curated with exercises from over 100 textbooks through a carefully designed pipeline for quality control. It covers five major physics domains: Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Thermodynamics, Optics, and Modern Physics. It also spans a wide range of difficulty levels, from high school to graduate-level physics courses. To utilize the data for improving and evaluating the model's physical reasoning capabilities, we split the dataset into training and test sets, and provide reasoning paths generated by powerful reasoning models for the training data to facilitate model training. In addition, for the evaluation part, we find that existing evaluation frameworks exhibit biases in aspects such as units, simplification, and precision in physics domain. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we introduce a Rule+Model evaluation framework tailored to physics problems. Our evaluations on current state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models highlight the limitations of current models in handling physics-related tasks. We hope that our dataset and evaluation methodology will jointly advance the development of LLMs in the field of physics. The code and data can be found at: https://github.com/Zhengsh123/PHYSICS.