UrbanSense:AFramework for Quantitative Analysis of Urban Streetscapes leveraging Vision Large Language Models

Urban cultures and architectural styles vary significantly across cities due to geographical, chronological, historical, and socio-political factors. Understanding these differences is essential for anticipating how cities may evolve in the future. As representative cases of historical continuity and modern innovation in China, Beijing and Shenzhen offer valuable perspectives for exploring the transformation of urban streetscapes. However, conventional approaches to urban cultural studies often rely on expert interpretation and historical documentation, which are difficult to standardize across different contexts. To address this, we propose a multimodal research framework based on vision-language models, enabling automated and scalable analysis of urban streetscape style differences. This approach enhances the objectivity and data-driven nature of urban form research. The contributions of this study are as follows: First, we construct UrbanDiffBench, a curated dataset of urban streetscapes containing architectural images from different periods and regions. Second, we develop UrbanSense, the first vision-language-model-based framework for urban streetscape analysis, enabling the quantitative generation and comparison of urban style representations. Third, experimental results show that Over 80% of generated descriptions pass the t-test (p less than 0.05). High Phi scores (0.912 for cities, 0.833 for periods) from subjective evaluations confirm the method's ability to capture subtle stylistic differences. These results highlight the method's potential to quantify and interpret urban style evolution, offering a scientifically grounded lens for future design.

FloorplanMAE:A self-supervised framework for complete floorplan generation from partial inputs

In the architectural design process, floorplan design is often a dynamic and iterative process. Architects progressively draw various parts of the floorplan according to their ideas and requirements, continuously adjusting and refining throughout the design process. Therefore, the ability to predict a complete floorplan from a partial one holds significant value in the design process. Such prediction can help architects quickly generate preliminary designs, improve design efficiency, and reduce the workload associated with repeated modifications. To address this need, we propose FloorplanMAE, a self-supervised learning framework for restoring incomplete floor plans into complete ones. First, we developed a floor plan reconstruction dataset, FloorplanNet, specifically trained on architectural floor plans. Secondly, we propose a floor plan reconstruction method based on Masked Autoencoders (MAE), which reconstructs missing parts by masking sections of the floor plan and training a lightweight Vision Transformer (ViT). We evaluated the reconstruction accuracy of FloorplanMAE and compared it with state-of-the-art benchmarks. Additionally, we validated the model using real sketches from the early stages of architectural design. Experimental results show that the FloorplanMAE model can generate high-quality complete floor plans from incomplete partial plans. This framework provides a scalable solution for floor plan generation, with broad application prospects.

Segment Any Architectural Facades (SAAF):An automatic segmentation model for building facades, walls and windows based on multimodal semantics guidance

In the context of the digital development of architecture, the automatic segmentation of walls and windows is a key step in improving the efficiency of building information models and computer-aided design. This study proposes an automatic segmentation model for building facade walls and windows based on multimodal semantic guidance, called Segment Any Architectural Facades (SAAF). First, SAAF has a multimodal semantic collaborative feature extraction mechanism. By combining natural language processing technology, it can fuse the semantic information in text descriptions with image features, enhancing the semantic understanding of building facade components. Second, we developed an end-to-end training framework that enables the model to autonomously learn the mapping relationship from text descriptions to image segmentation, reducing the influence of manual intervention on the segmentation results and improving the automation and robustness of the model. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments on multiple facade datasets. The segmentation results of SAAF outperformed existing methods in the mIoU metric, indicating that the SAAF model can maintain high-precision segmentation ability when faced with diverse datasets. Our model has made certain progress in improving the accuracy and generalization ability of the wall and window segmentation task. It is expected to provide a reference for the development of architectural computer vision technology and also explore new ideas and technical paths for the application of multimodal learning in the architectural field.

ArchiLense: A Framework for Quantitative Analysis of Architectural Styles Based on Vision Large Language Models

Architectural cultures across regions are characterized by stylistic diversity, shaped by historical, social, and technological contexts in addition to geograph-ical conditions. Understanding architectural styles requires the ability to describe and analyze the stylistic features of different architects from various regions through visual observations of architectural imagery. However, traditional studies of architectural culture have largely relied on subjective expert interpretations and historical literature reviews, often suffering from regional biases and limited ex-planatory scope. To address these challenges, this study proposes three core contributions: (1) We construct a professional architectural style dataset named ArchDiffBench, which comprises 1,765 high-quality architectural images and their corresponding style annotations, collected from different regions and historical periods. (2) We propose ArchiLense, an analytical framework grounded in Vision-Language Models and constructed using the ArchDiffBench dataset. By integrating ad-vanced computer vision techniques, deep learning, and machine learning algo-rithms, ArchiLense enables automatic recognition, comparison, and precise classi-fication of architectural imagery, producing descriptive language outputs that ar-ticulate stylistic differences. (3) Extensive evaluations show that ArchiLense achieves strong performance in architectural style recognition, with a 92.4% con-sistency rate with expert annotations and 84.5% classification accuracy, effec-tively capturing stylistic distinctions across images. The proposed approach transcends the subjectivity inherent in traditional analyses and offers a more objective and accurate perspective for comparative studies of architectural culture.

Train with Perturbation, Infer after Merging: A Two-Stage Framework for Continual Learning

Continual Learning (CL) aims to enable models to continuously acquire new knowledge from a sequence of tasks with avoiding the forgetting of learned information. However, existing CL methods only rely on the parameters of the most recent task for inference, which makes them susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. Inspired by the recent success of model merging techniques, we propose \textbf{Perturb-and-Merge (P\&M)}, a novel continual learning framework that integrates model merging into the CL paradigm to mitigate forgetting. Specifically, after training on each task, P\&M constructs a new model by forming a convex combination of the previous model and the newly trained task-specific model. Through theoretical analysis, we minimize the total loss increase across all tasks and derive an analytical solution for the optimal merging coefficient. To further improve the performance of the merged model, we observe that the degradation introduced during merging can be alleviated by a regularization term composed of the task vector and the Hessian matrix of the loss function. Interestingly, we show that this term can be efficiently approximated using second-order symmetric finite differences, and a stochastic perturbation strategy along the task vector direction is accordingly devised which incurs no additional forward or backward passes while providing an effective approximation of the regularization term. Finally, we combine P\&M with LoRA, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, to reduce memory overhead. Our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several continual learning benchmark datasets.

SplitLoRA: Balancing Stability and Plasticity in Continual Learning Through Gradient Space Splitting

Continual Learning requires a model to learn multiple tasks in sequence while maintaining both stability:preserving knowledge from previously learned tasks, and plasticity:effectively learning new tasks. Gradient projection has emerged as an effective and popular paradigm in CL, where it partitions the gradient space of previously learned tasks into two orthogonal subspaces: a primary subspace and a minor subspace. New tasks are learned effectively within the minor subspace, thereby reducing interference with previously acquired knowledge. However, existing Gradient Projection methods struggle to achieve an optimal balance between plasticity and stability, as it is hard to appropriately partition the gradient space. In this work, we consider a continual learning paradigm based on Low-Rank Adaptation, which has gained considerable attention due to its efficiency and wide applicability, and propose a novel approach for continual learning, called SplitLoRA. We first provide a theoretical analysis of how subspace partitioning affects model stability and plasticity. Informed by this analysis, we then introduce an effective method that derives the optimal partition of the gradient space for previously learned tasks. This approach effectively balances stability and plasticity in continual learning. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

P3Net: Progressive and Periodic Perturbation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Perturbation with diverse unlabeled data has proven beneficial for semi-supervised medical image segmentation (SSMIS). While many works have successfully used various perturbation techniques, a deeper understanding of learning perturbations is needed. Excessive or inappropriate perturbation can have negative effects, so we aim to address two challenges: how to use perturbation mechanisms to guide the learning of unlabeled data through labeled data, and how to ensure accurate predictions in boundary regions. Inspired by human progressive and periodic learning, we propose a progressive and periodic perturbation mechanism (P3M) and a boundary-focused loss. P3M enables dynamic adjustment of perturbations, allowing the model to gradually learn them. Our boundary-focused loss encourages the model to concentrate on boundary regions, enhancing sensitivity to intricate details and ensuring accurate predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two 2D and 3D datasets. Moreover, P3M is extendable to other methods, and the proposed loss serves as a universal tool for improving existing methods, highlighting the scalability and applicability of our approach.

JTreeformer: Graph-Transformer via Latent-Diffusion Model for Molecular Generation

The discovery of new molecules based on the original chemical molecule distributions is of great importance in medicine. The graph transformer, with its advantages of high performance and scalability compared to traditional graph networks, has been widely explored in recent research for applications of graph structures. However, current transformer-based graph decoders struggle to effectively utilize graph information, which limits their capacity to leverage only sequences of nodes rather than the complex topological structures of molecule graphs. This paper focuses on building a graph transformer-based framework for molecular generation, which we call \textbf{JTreeformer} as it transforms graph generation into junction tree generation. It combines GCN parallel with multi-head attention as the encoder. It integrates a directed acyclic GCN into a graph-based Transformer to serve as a decoder, which can iteratively synthesize the entire molecule by leveraging information from the partially constructed molecular structure at each step. In addition, a diffusion model is inserted in the latent space generated by the encoder, to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of sampling further. The empirical results demonstrate that our novel framework outperforms existing molecule generation methods, thus offering a promising tool to advance drug discovery (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JTreeformer-C74C).

SFi-Former: Sparse Flow Induced Attention for Graph Transformer

Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated superior performance compared to traditional message-passing graph neural networks in many studies, especially in processing graph data with long-range dependencies. However, GTs tend to suffer from weak inductive bias, overfitting and over-globalizing problems due to the dense attention. In this paper, we introduce SFi-attention, a novel attention mechanism designed to learn sparse pattern by minimizing an energy function based on network flows with l1-norm regularization, to relieve those issues caused by dense attention. Furthermore, SFi-Former is accordingly devised which can leverage the sparse attention pattern of SFi-attention to generate sparse network flows beyond adjacency matrix of graph data. Specifically, SFi-Former aggregates features selectively from other nodes through flexible adaptation of the sparse attention, leading to a more robust model. We validate our SFi-Former on various graph datasets, especially those graph data exhibiting long-range dependencies. Experimental results show that our SFi-Former obtains competitive performance on GNN Benchmark datasets and SOTA performance on LongRange Graph Benchmark (LRGB) datasets. Additionally, our model gives rise to smaller generalization gaps, which indicates that it is less prone to over-fitting. Click here for codes.

DiVE: Efficient Multi-View Driving Scenes Generation Based on Video Diffusion Transformer

Collecting multi-view driving scenario videos to enhance the performance of 3D visual perception tasks presents significant challenges and incurs substantial costs, making generative models for realistic data an appealing alternative. Yet, the videos generated by recent works suffer from poor quality and spatiotemporal consistency, undermining their utility in advancing perception tasks under driving scenarios. To address this gap, we propose DiVE, a diffusion transformer-based generative framework meticulously engineered to produce high-fidelity, temporally coherent, and cross-view consistent multi-view videos, aligning seamlessly with bird's-eye view layouts and textual descriptions. DiVE leverages a unified cross-attention and a SketchFormer to exert precise control over multimodal data, while incorporating a view-inflated attention mechanism that adds no extra parameters, thereby guaranteeing consistency across views. Despite these advancements, synthesizing high-resolution videos under multimodal constraints introduces dual challenges: investigating the optimal classifier-free guidance coniguration under intricate multi-condition inputs and mitigating excessive computational latency in high-resolution rendering--both of which remain underexplored in prior researches. To resolve these limitations, we introduce two innovations: Multi-Control Auxiliary Branch Distillation, which streamlines multi-condition CFG selection while circumventing high computational overhead, and Resolution Progressive Sampling, a training-free acceleration strategy that staggers resolution scaling to reduce high latency due to high resolution. These innovations collectively achieve a 2.62x speedup with minimal quality degradation. Evaluated on the nuScenes dataset, DiVE achieves SOTA performance in multi-view video generation, yielding photorealistic outputs with exceptional temporal and cross-view coherence.