Physion: Evaluating Physical Prediction from Vision in Humans and Machines

While machine learning algorithms excel at many challenging visual tasks, it is unclear that they can make predictions about commonplace real world physical events. Here, we present a visual and physical prediction benchmark that precisely measures this capability. In realistically simulating a wide variety of physical phenomena – rigid and soft-body collisions, stable multi-object configurations, rolling and sliding, projectile motion – our dataset presents a more comprehensive challenge than existing benchmarks. Moreover, we have collected human responses for our stimuli so that model predictions can be directly compared to human judgments. We compare an array of algorithms – varying in their architecture, learning objective, input-output structure, and training data – on their ability to make diverse physical predictions. We find that graph neural networks with access to the physical state best capture human behavior, whereas among models that receive only visual input, those with object-centric representations or pretraining do best but fall far short of human accuracy. This suggests that extracting physically meaningful representations of scenes is the main bottleneck to achieving human-like visual prediction. We thus demonstrate how our benchmark can identify areas for improvement and measure progress on this key aspect of physical understanding.