PhysicsBench: A Unified Leaderboard for Generative and Predictive Models in Engineering Design and Simulation

Abstract

Generative and predictive artificial intelligence models are increasingly used to generate geometry and to predict physical fields and scalar quantities in engineering design and simulation. Yet these models are typically evaluated in isolation, on academic datasets at unconstrained scales, with inconsistent metrics and procedures. We present PhysicsBench, a unified benchmark and leaderboard that evaluates generative and predictive models under one standardized procedure. PhysicsBench spans seven generation and prediction tasks across 1D, 2D, and 3D domains and ranks 66 models on nine datasets, comprising industrial-scale CAD/CFD/FEA simulations and public references, expanded into 28 configurations. One procedure and ranking apply to both families, each ranked within its own tasks. Evaluation spans realistic, limited data scales from S to XL rather than the unlimited training sets common in academic benchmarks. A common metric suite captures geometric fidelity with distributional distances, physical-field and scalar accuracy, and engineering-specific field- and shape-validity. BenchRank debiases correlated metrics and ranks by PageRank over a head-to-head dominance graph, so every reported quality metric is also ranked, with computational cost in a separate efficiency view. Across tasks, an architecture's large-scale academic standing weakly predicts its small-data ranking. The top model changes with data scale in six of the seven tasks, and no model leads more than one task. PhysicsBench turns "state-of-the-art" from a self-reported claim into an openly published foundation for model selection.