PhysEvolve: Verifier-grounded Self-evolution for Physical Reasoning with Executable Worlds

Jinyuan Hu, Yilei Jiang, Chen Tang, Minghong Cai, Xinran Liu +1

Physical reasoning underpins how embodied systems understand and act in the physical world, yet vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable on questions about dynamics and physical causality. Progress is critically constrained by the scarcity of grounded counterfactual training data, as observational videos capture only the factual trajectory that occurred. The self-evolving paradigm offers a route beyond fixed datasets by enabling models to construct their own training problems. Extending this paradigm to physics, however, requires an external source of truth that can both validate model-proposed environments and verify alternative physical outcomes under intervention. We introduce \physevolve{}, a verifier-grounded self-evolving framework that trains VLMs for causal physical reasoning from model-proposed executable worlds and simulation-authored tasks. At each round, a shared VLM proposes executable world programs and evidence schemas; a deterministic physics engine freezes each valid world, simulates matched baseline and body-elided counterfactual branches, and synthesizes discrete, answer-bound visual tasks. Exact verifier feedback from task solving updates both the…