# Intuitive Physics

GenEA places an agent's coarse body biomechanics and its physical interactions with nearby objects into a multilevel state space, then embeds that space in a generative model to yield a joint probability distribution over goals and embodied plans. Earlier accounts of how people reason about plans mostly abstracted agents as point-like entities in two-dimensional grid worlds, which cannot carry the body and terrain constraints of natural settings. Across block-manipulation and obstacle-course navigation experiments, simple transformations of that joint distribution reproduce human goal inferences, action inferences, one-hand versus two-hand strategy preferences and difficulty judgments, outperforming a task-and-motion-planning baseline, heuristic models and a frontier vision-language model.

GenEA places an agent's coarse body biomechanics and its physical interactions with nearby objects into a multilevel state space, then embeds that space in a generative model to yield a joint probability distribution over goals and embodied plans. Earlier accounts of how people reason about plans mostly abstracted agents as point-like entities in two-dimensional grid worlds, which cannot carry the body and terrain constraints of natural settings. Across block-manipulation and obstacle-course navigation experiments, simple transformations of that joint distribution reproduce human goal inferences, action inferences, one-hand versus two-hand strategy preferences and difficulty judgments, outperforming a task-and-motion-planning baseline, heuristic models and a frontier vision-language model.