PhysAI-Bench: A Benchmark for LLM-Based Agentic Decision-Making in Autonomous UAV-Centric Physical AI

Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Merouane Debbah, Abderrahmane Lakas, Manu Perumkunnil, Norbert Tihanyi

Recent advances in Physical AI have accelerated the use of foundation models in autonomous systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which must perceive, reason, plan, and act in dynamic environments. Existing benchmarks assess physical perception, intuitive physics, embodied navigation, and collaborative reasoning, but rarely evaluate the agentic decision-making required for reliable autonomy. We introduce \textit{PhysAI-Bench}, a benchmark for evaluating this capability. It contains 10,178 standardized decision instances automatically extracted from conversational traces of autonomous UAV missions. Each instance preserves mission context, temporal dependencies, physical constraints, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool calls, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions, sensor observations, and AI-native 6G network conditions, including latency, packet loss, throughput, edge load, and network slicing. We expose only information preceding each decision, preventing future-event leakage and approximating online decision-making. We evaluate 29 foundation models using a two-stage protocol. We select model-specific configurations from 12 combinations of zero-, three-, and five-shot…