Φ(fight) Research

What we do

Φ is an independent research collective for physical-world AI combat and adversarial testing.

We build both — the sword and the shield. The sword: attackers that break frontier physical AI at its weakest points. The shield: what those attacks reveal, distilled into stronger physical AI. Two halves of the same collective.

What we build

• A cheat-proof embodied-adversarial standard for physical AI, driven by a learned world-model attacker that stress-tests frontier VLAs and world models.
• A community release of the attacker — a version-frozen, fine-tunable base that red-teamers, safety teams, and defenders build on.
• A mechanistic account of where physical AI breaks: state sensitivity and observability collide at contact — a millimeter changes everything, and the robot can’t see.
• A force-native computational primitive for contact dynamics, plus adversarial fidelity certification of learned contact simulators.
• How physical resource constraints (torque, battery) reshape emergent strategy — tight budgets produce richer, more deceptive attacks than unbounded settings.
• A combat-robot simulation platform for autonomous physical-world AI fighting; humanoid combat leagues as the first instance, a long-term substrate for serious combat AI beyond.

People

Liu Yuchen Founder · HKUST

Han Muchen Founding Researcher · HKUST

Work in progress

We are building the two founding artifacts of the fight / adversarial category in physical AI:

• the benchmark — the cheat-proof standard the frontier zoo runs against;
• the attacker — a learned world-model adversary that produces the failures the standard scores.

Both ship open: code, weights, leaderboard, community-fine-tunable base.

Open to

Investment, grants, and collaboration. Reach out — general@φ.monster.

On the name

The symbol is Φ. We pronounce it fight.

The logo is a sword piercing a shield — the two halves of what we build. Φ attacks the frontier (the sword) and, from what the attack reveals, builds the defense (the shield). Both are the same collective.

Physical AI, fight the monster. We are the monster.