Rethinking Pretraining for Specialized Design Data: Evidence from the JONES-19 Cultural Design Dataset

Design and architectural archives encode expert human knowledge in graphical formats, providing a critical testbed for design-inspired Machine Learning (ML) challenges absent with typical computer vision benchmarks. Building on JONES-19, a small-size image dataset based on The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1857), we evaluate the discriminative performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in two model training strategies: (a) ImageNet pretraining for domain-general "visual common sense," and (b) learning from scratch on the design data in JONES-19. We find that while domain-general priors improve discriminative performance, learning from scratch augmented with repeated local sampling (multi-crop) effectively recovers these gains. For highly structured design data, local design-driven representations provide sufficient foundation for learning, challenging a reliance on massive general-purpose pretraining. These findings suggest that in specialized design domains, careful curation of smaller high-quality datasets that capture empirical and formal design principles may prove more effective and informative on the nature of a particular design domain than prioritizing large-scale data collection.

Evaluation of Architectural Synthesis Using Generative AI

Recent advancements in multimodal Generative AI have the potential to democratize specialized architectural tasks, such as interpreting technical drawings and creating 3D CAD models, which traditionally require expert knowledge. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of two systems: GPT-4o and Claude 3.5, in the task of architectural 3D synthesis. We conduct a case study on two buildings from Palladio's Four Books of Architecture (1965): Villa Rotonda and Palazzo Porto. High-level architectural models and drawings of these buildings were prepared, inspired by Palladio's original texts and drawings. Through sequential text and image prompting, we assess the systems' abilities in (1) interpreting 2D and 3D representations of buildings from drawings, (2) encoding the buildings into a CAD software script, and (3) self-improving based on outputs. While both systems successfully generate individual parts, they struggle to accurately assemble these parts into the desired spatial relationships, with Claude 3.5 demonstrating better performance, particularly in self-correcting its output. This study contributes to ongoing research on benchmarking the strengths and weaknesses of off-the-shelf AI systems in performing intelligent human tasks that require discipline-specific knowledge. The findings highlight the potential of language-enabled AI systems to act as collaborative technical assistants in the architectural design process.

Natural Language and Spatial Rules

We develop a system that formally represents spatial semantics concepts within natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements. The system builds on a model of spatial semantics representation according to which words in a sentence are assigned spatial roles and the relations among these roles are represented with spatial relations. We combine our system with the shape grammar formalism that uses shape rules to generate languages (sets) of two-dimensional shapes. Our proposed system consists of pairs of shape rules and verbal rules where the verbal rules describe in English the action of the associated shape rule. We present various types of natural language descriptions of shapes that are successfully parsed by our system and we discuss open questions and challenges we see at the interface of language and perception.