Do Physics Foundation Models Learn Generalizable Physics? A Bias-Aware Benchmark Across Physical Regimes and Distribution Shifts

Scientific foundation models are expected to reuse representations under changes in dataset, acquisition protocol, and deployment domain, yet many sequence backbones treat scientific temporal structure as an unconstrained pattern to be fitted. We argue that this misses a central property of natural dynamical systems: neural and atmospheric time series are organized by interacting processes across multiple physical timescales, and failure to preserve this multiscale structure contributes to brittleness under distribution shift. We formalize this failure mode as temporal kernel mismatch, where a model fits in-distribution dynamics with an effective memory policy that is not anchored to the signal's physical timescales, leading to representation drift and degraded transfer. We propose Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Mamba (PIMSM), a state-space architecture that maps spectrum-estimated transition points between frequency regimes (knee frequencies) to scale-specific discretization parameters and anchors them to acquisition time units. On Human Connectome Project fMRI, PIMSM improves robustness and representation stability under severe temporal-context truncation, extreme low-resource transfer, and resting-state-to-task-state generalization. Without modality-specific adaptation, the same architecture also attains the lowest variable-wise MAE across all reported horizons and variables on Weather-5K held-out-station spatial out-of-distribution forecasting. These results support temporal-scale alignment as a practical inductive bias for scientific foundation models that must preserve structure, not only fit correlations, under deployment shift.

The largest machine learning models in particle physics are also the most expensive to train, yet the return on scaling a given architecture cannot be estimated before that compute is spent. Scaling laws have been fit for jets, but none has yet been shown to predict the performance of models it was not fit on. We show that, for a generic transformer pretrained on collider jets, it can be forecast. Fitting a joint model-and-data scaling law on small models alone, spanning three orders of magnitude of training compute, we predict the loss of models trained afterward with more than one hundred times more compute to within one percent. We then connect the forecast to downstream physics performance: across two standard tagging benchmarks, lower pretraining loss yields systematically lower fine-tuning loss and higher background rejection after fine-tuning. Within this model family and these tasks, a compute budget can therefore be translated into expected physics performance before any large model is trained. The final frontier model is consistent with the published numbers for current state-of-the-art physics-aware foundation models trained on the same corpus, on accuracy, AUC, and quark/gluon rejection, with a residual edge for the physics-aware model only in the high-purity tail of top tagging. We release five pretrained models spanning multiple sizes, together with the complete training recipe and code.

Whether physics foundation models can be usefully deployed on laboratory experiments remains an open question for scientific machine learning (ML). We test this question on the Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI), a ubiquitous and demanding fluid instability seen from tabletop flows to supernova explosions, in which small perturbations at a density interface grow into chaotic, multiscale mixing as a lighter fluid accelerates into a heavier one. Standard ML models struggle with RTI, and despite over a century of theoretical, numerical, and experimental work, it carries an unresolved discrepancy between simulation and experiment: the late-time mixing growth rate, $α$, measured in most laboratory experiments ($\sim$ 0.06-0.07), is roughly three times the value from idealized direct numerical simulations (DNS, $\sim$ 0.02). The gap's origin remains debated. These properties make RTI a stringent test for a question that matters well beyond RTI: can foundation models trained only on simulations generalise to sparse, messy, and noisy laboratory settings? We finetune Walrus, a foundation model for continuum dynamics, on three or fewer DNS realizations and recover key RTI physics over long rollouts. Applied zero-shot to sliding-barrier laboratory data, the finetuned model leaves the DNS-like regime and enters the observed growth band, having never seen a single experimental sample. These results provide independent, data-driven evidence that initial conditions play a crucial role in the longstanding sim-experiment gap in $α$. The model also generalises zero-shot to stable stratification, a buoyancy regime absent from training, correctly slowing mixing-layer growth. Together, our results show that foundation models can generalise well beyond their training data, predicting laboratory behavior and unseen physical regimes, opening new ways to probe longstanding simulation-experiment gaps.