PIQA: Physical Commonsense Reasoning Test

Measures the model’s ability to apply practical, everyday commonsense reasoning about physical objects and scenarios through simple decision-making questions.

Overview

PIQA is a benchmark to measure the model’s physical commonsense reasoning.

Usage

Installation

There are two ways of using Inspect Evals, from pypi as a dependency of your own project and as a standalone checked out GitHub repository.

If you are using it from pypi, install the package and its dependencies via:

pip install inspect-evals

If you are using Inspect Evals in its repository, start by installing the necessary dependencies with:

uv sync

Running evaluations

Now you can start evaluating models. For simplicity’s sake, this section assumes you are using Inspect Evals from the standalone repo. If that’s not the case and you are not using uv to manage dependencies in your own project, you can use the same commands with uv run dropped.

uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/piqa --model openai/gpt-5-nano

You can also import tasks as normal Python objects and run them from python:

from inspect_ai import eval
from inspect_evals.piqa import piqa
eval(piqa)

After running evaluations, you can view their logs using the inspect view command:

uv run inspect view

For VS Code, you can also download Inspect AI extension for viewing logs.

If you don’t want to specify the --model each time you run an evaluation, create a .env configuration file in your working directory that defines the INSPECT_EVAL_MODEL environment variable along with your API key. For example:

INSPECT_EVAL_MODEL=anthropic/claude-opus-4-1-20250805
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=<anthropic-api-key>

Options

You can control a variety of options from the command line. For example:

uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/piqa --limit 10
uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/piqa --max-connections 10
uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/piqa --temperature 0.5

See uv run inspect eval --help for all available options.

Dataset

Here is an example prompt from the dataset (after it has been further processed by Inspect):

The entire content of your response should be of the following format: ‘ANSWER:$LETTER’ (without quotes) where LETTER is one of A,B.

Given either a question or a statement followed by two possible solutions labelled A and B, choose the most appropriate solution. If a question is given, the solutions answer the question. If a statement is given, the solutions explain how to achieve the statement.

How do I ready a guinea pig cage for it’s new occupants?

1. Provide the guinea pig with a cage full of a few inches of bedding made of ripped paper strips, you will also need to supply it with a water bottle and a food dish.
   
2. Provide the guinea pig with a cage full of a few inches of bedding made of ripped jeans material, you will also need to supply it with a water bottle and a food dish.

The model is then tasked to pick the correct choice.

Scoring

A simple accuracy is calculated over the datapoints.