BuildArena: A Physics-Aligned Interactive Benchmark of LLMs for Engineering Construction
This addresses the problem of evaluating LLMs for physically viable construction tasks, which is incremental as it provides a new benchmark for an emerging application area.
The paper tackles the lack of evaluation for LLMs in engineering construction automation by introducing BuildArena, a physics-aligned interactive benchmark, and finds that it comprehensively assesses eight frontier LLMs' capabilities in this domain.
Engineering construction automation aims to transform natural language specifications into physically viable structures, requiring complex integrated reasoning under strict physical constraints. While modern LLMs possess broad knowledge and strong reasoning capabilities that make them promising candidates for this domain, their construction competencies remain largely unevaluated. To address this gap, we introduce BuildArena, the first physics-aligned interactive benchmark designed for language-driven engineering construction. It contributes to the community in four aspects: (1) a highly customizable benchmarking framework for in-depth comparison and analysis of LLMs; (2) an extendable task design strategy spanning static and dynamic mechanics across multiple difficulty tiers; (3) a 3D Spatial Geometric Computation Library for supporting construction based on language instructions; (4) a baseline LLM agentic workflow that effectively evaluates diverse model capabilities. On eight frontier LLMs, BuildArena comprehensively evaluates their capabilities for language-driven and physics-grounded construction automation. The project page is at https://build-arena.github.io/.