LLMs describe physics well but don't "understand" it in any grounded sense — they've learned statistical relationships between tokens like "falls" and "gravity", not actual physical intuition. This is basically the Mary's Room problem: Mary knows every physical fact about color but has never seen one. LLMs are Mary.

The idea I've been thinking about:

  1. Train a JEPA-style model inside a physics simulation (think MuJoCo or a simple 2D env). Instead of predicting pixels or tokens, the model predicts representations of future states in an abstract embedding space. If it gets physics wrong, the predictor fails — the loss is unforgiving in a way next-token prediction never is.

  2. The embedding space that emerges should encode actual physical structure — object permanence, momentum, trajectories — because that's what makes prediction possible. Not surface-level textures, just the principles.

  3. Freeze those representations and attach them to an LLM-style reasoning model as a conditioning signal. The LLM now has both linguistic physics knowledge AND grounded physical intuition it can actually "run" forward — closer to a computational primitive than a propositional fact.

The hypothesis is this makes downstream learning significantly faster — the LLM doesn't have to rediscover that objects fall, it has representations that already encode that.

V-JEPA does something adjacent for video (predict future frame representations, not pixels), and DreamerV3 uses a latent world model for efficient RL — but the specific combo of JEPA-style prediction + sim-grounded physics representations + LLM attachment doesn't seem to have been done cleanly.

Questions for the community: - Is there prior work I'm missing that does exactly this? - What's the right interface between grounded JEPA representations and a language model? Just concatenate to the prompt embedding? Cross-attention? - Would the sim-to-reality gap kill the transfer, or are the representations abstract enough to survive it?

Interested in whether this is worth building a small prototype for.

submitted by /u/Full_Promotion4522
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