FireWorldBench: Benchmarking Complex Physical World Intelligence through Coupled-Field Fire Dynamics

Abstract

Understanding the physical world requires more than object recognition, scene description, and short-term visual prediction, as real-world physical systems involve multiple continuous fields, latent causal mechanisms, partial observations, and intervention-sensitive dynamics. We propose FireWorldBench, a benchmark for evaluating complex physical world intelligence in multimodal large language models and agents through coupled-field fire dynamics. Fire provides a canonical stress-test environment, where multiple interacting physical fields jointly shape observable states and temporal dynamics. FireWorldBench is organized along two complementary axes, a physical capability axis and a fire scenario task axis, jointly covering physical-state understanding, temporal dynamics, causal mechanisms, and intervention reasoning. The benchmark comprises 520 fire-world entries, including 494 controlled simulation worlds and 26 real-world-aligned event groups, spanning 47 scene archetypes across 7 environment families. These entries combine structured textual observations, multiple 2D physical-field visualizations, and 3D event-level scene modeling, yielding 9,074 text-image interleaved question-answer pairs across choice-based and open-ended report-generation formats. FireWorldBench evaluates whether models can infer latent physical states, explain underlying mechanisms, forecast coupled-field evolution, and assess intervention consequences from multimodal partial observations, providing a challenging testbed for complex physical world intelligence.