Ye Peng

Fangchen Yu, Haiyuan Wan, Qianjia Cheng et al. · pku, tsinghua

Recently, the physical capabilities of (M)LLMs have garnered increasing attention. However, existing benchmarks for physics suffer from two major gaps: they neither provide systematic and up-to-date coverage of real-world physics competitions such as physics Olympiads, nor enable direct performance comparison with humans. To bridge these gaps, we present HiPhO, the first benchmark dedicated to high school physics Olympiads with human-aligned evaluation. Specifically, HiPhO highlights three key innovations. (1) Comprehensive Data: It compiles 13 latest Olympiad exams from 2024-2025, spanning both international and regional competitions, and covering mixed modalities that encompass problems spanning text-only to diagram-based. (2) Professional Evaluation: We adopt official marking schemes to perform fine-grained grading at both the answer and step level, fully aligned with human examiners to ensure high-quality and domain-specific evaluation. (3) Comparison with Human Contestants: We assign gold, silver, and bronze medals to models based on official medal thresholds, thereby enabling direct comparison between (M)LLMs and human contestants. Our large-scale evaluation of 30 state-of-the-art (M)LLMs shows that: across 13 exams, open-source MLLMs mostly remain at or below the bronze level; open-source LLMs show promising progress with multiple golds; closed-source reasoning MLLMs can achieve 6 to 12 gold medals; and most models still have a significant gap from full marks. These results highlight the performance gap between open-source models and top students, the strong reasoning abilities of closed-source models, and the remaining room for improvement. HiPhO, a human-aligned Olympiad benchmark for multimodal physical reasoning, is open-source at https://github.com/SciYu/HiPhO with a public leaderboard at https://phyarena.github.io/.

Yaoxin Yang, Peng Ye, Weihao Lin et al.

Heterogeneous distillation is an effective way to transfer knowledge from cross-architecture teacher models to student models. However, existing heterogeneous distillation methods do not take full advantage of the dark knowledge hidden in the teacher's output, limiting their performance.To this end, we propose a novel framework named Multi-Level Decoupled Relational Knowledge Distillation (MLDR-KD) to unleash the potential of relational distillation in heterogeneous distillation. Concretely, we first introduce Decoupled Finegrained Relation Alignment (DFRA) in both logit and feature levels to balance the trade-off between distilled dark knowledge and the confidence in the correct category of the heterogeneous teacher model. Then, Multi-Scale Dynamic Fusion (MSDF) module is applied to dynamically fuse the projected logits of multiscale features at different stages in student model, further improving performance of our method in feature level. We verify our method on four architectures (CNNs, Transformers, MLPs and Mambas), two datasets (CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet). Compared with the best available method, our MLDR-KD improves student model performance with gains of up to 4.86% on CIFAR-100 and 2.78% on Tiny-ImageNet datasets respectively, showing robustness and generality in heterogeneous distillation. Code will be released soon.