Can AI Reason Like an Urban Planner? Benchmarking Large Language Models Against Professional Judgment

Problem, Research Strategy, and Findings: The rise of large language models (LLMs) raises a key question for urban planning: which forms of professional planning knowledge can AI replicate, and which still require human judgment? Although AI tools are increasingly used in planning practice, there is still no systematic framework for testing whether they can reason with the contextual sensitivity, value awareness, and institutional literacy central to planning expertise. This paper introduces Urban Planning Bench (UPBench), a domain-specific evaluation framework that assesses LLM reasoning through a 4x5 matrix of four knowledge pillars and five cognitive levels adapted from Bloom's revised taxonomy. Evaluating 25 LLMs with automated scoring and expert review, we find a non-monotonic cognitive curve: models perform better on higher-order analytical tasks than on factual recall and integrative judgment. This suggests that planning knowledge often treated as lower-order is deeply shaped by institutional, jurisdictional, and temporal context, making it hard for LLMs to generalize. We summarize these limits as four epistemic diagnostics: regulatory hallucination, conceptual conflation, wickedness paralysis, and phronetic deficit. Takeaway for Practice: The findings support differential delegation in planning. LLMs can assist with cross-disciplinary synthesis, literature review, scenario generation, and preliminary policy analysis. However, they remain unreliable for jurisdiction-specific regulation, normative conflict resolution, and context-sensitive procedure. Agencies should require verification for AI-assisted regulatory analysis, while planning education should emphasize institutional literacy, normative judgment, and contextual sensitivity.

ZAS-SQL: Distilling Rules from Failures for Zero-Shot Text-to-SQL

Text-to-SQL translates natural language into executable SQL queries. Few-shot in-context learning methods built upon large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance, yet their reliance on demonstrations limits cross-domain generalization and consumes substantial context window space. Existing zero-shot methods, lacking effective generation constraints, still fall short of few-shot approaches. We observe that LLM failures in zero-shot Text-to-SQL are not random but exhibit systematic, recurring patterns. Building on this observation, we propose a fully zero-shot Text-to-SQL framework that distills core generation rules from failure cases through a Map-Reduce-based rule distillation pipeline and improves generation quality via three complementary modules: knowledge-augmented schema representation, which supplements missing semantics in Data Definition Language; a rule-driven structured reasoning framework that suppresses structural deviations; and Execution-Guided Early Stopping, which enables low-cost self-correction. On Spider, the proposed framework achieves up to 87.2% and 88.6% execution accuracy on the Dev and Test sets, respectively, establishing a new zero-shot state-of-the-art and surpassing multiple few-shot and fine-tuning methods built upon GPT-4/4o. On the domain-specific dataset UrbanPlan, it achieves 81.3%, confirming that the rule distillation approach generalizes across domains. Moreover, when equipped with a 4B-parameter model, the framework surpasses zero-shot baselines of leading closed-source models, demonstrating strong model generality.

PlanBench-V: A Spatial Planning Map Benchmark for Vision-Language Models

Spatial planning maps are central to territorial governance, translating planning objectives, regulations, and spatial strategies into visual forms for decision-making, public communication, and institutional coordination. Their interpretation, however, requires fine-grained visual perception, spatial reasoning, and policy-informed professional judgment, creating major challenges for both human learners and AI systems. With the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), their use in urban planning analysis is gaining attention, yet existing multimodal benchmarks mainly target general visual understanding and overlook the domain-specific cognitive processes of planning practice. To address this gap, we introduce PlanBench-V, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs in spatial planning map interpretation. We first build the Spatial Planning Map Database (SPMD), an expert-annotated dataset of 223 planning maps and 1629 question-answer pairs curated by professional planners, covering diverse geographic regions and cartographic styles. We then propose a theory-informed evaluation framework assessing four progressive capabilities: Perception, Reasoning, Association, and Implementation, corresponding to the cognitive pipeline of planning map interpretation. Extensive experiments across two generations of VLMs show clear progress but persistent limitations. The best 2026 agentic reasoning model, Qwen3.6-Plus, substantially outperforms the best 2025 model, GPT-4o, by 27%. Nevertheless, all models still struggle with implementation-oriented tasks requiring evaluative judgment, policy sensitivity, and constraint-aware decision-making. These findings reveal fundamental limitations of current VLMs in professional planning contexts and highlight the need for domain-adaptive multimodal reasoning frameworks. Code and data are available at https://plangpt.github.io.

TAG-INSTRUCT: Controlled Instruction Complexity Enhancement through Structure-based Augmentation

High-quality instruction data is crucial for developing large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches struggle to effectively control instruction complexity. We present TAG-INSTRUCT, a novel framework that enhances instruction complexity through structured semantic compression and controlled difficulty augmentation. Unlike previous prompt-based methods operating on raw text, TAG-INSTRUCT compresses instructions into a compact tag space and systematically enhances complexity through RL-guided tag expansion. Through extensive experiments, we show that TAG-INSTRUCT outperforms existing instruction complexity augmentation approaches. Our analysis reveals that operating in tag space provides superior controllability and stability across different instruction synthesis frameworks.

PlanGPT-VL: Enhancing Urban Planning with Domain-Specific Vision-Language Models

In the field of urban planning, existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently fail to effectively analyze and evaluate planning maps, despite the critical importance of these visual elements for urban planners and related educational contexts. Planning maps, which visualize land use, infrastructure layouts, and functional zoning, require specialized understanding of spatial configurations, regulatory requirements, and multi-scale analysis. To address this challenge, we introduce PlanGPT-VL, the first domain-specific Vision-Language Model tailored specifically for urban planning maps. PlanGPT-VL employs three innovative approaches: (1) PlanAnno-V framework for high-quality VQA data synthesis, (2) Critical Point Thinking to reduce hallucinations through structured verification, and (3) comprehensive training methodology combining Supervised Fine-Tuning with frozen vision encoder parameters. Through systematic evaluation on our proposed PlanBench-V benchmark, we demonstrate that PlanGPT-VL significantly outperforms general-purpose state-of-the-art VLMs in specialized planning map interpretation tasks, offering urban planning professionals a reliable tool for map analysis, assessment, and educational applications while maintaining high factual accuracy. Our lightweight 7B parameter model achieves comparable performance to models exceeding 72B parameters, demonstrating efficient domain specialization without sacrificing performance.

FANNO: Augmenting High-Quality Instruction Data with Open-Sourced LLMs Only

Instruction fine-tuning stands as a crucial advancement in leveraging large language models (LLMs) for enhanced task performance. However, the annotation of instruction datasets has traditionally been expensive and laborious, often relying on manual annotations or costly API calls of proprietary LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce FANNO, a fully autonomous, open-sourced framework that revolutionizes the annotation process without the need for pre-existing annotated data. Utilizing a Mistral-7b-instruct model, FANNO efficiently produces diverse and high-quality datasets through a structured process involving document pre-screening, instruction generation, and response generation. Experiments on Open LLM Leaderboard and AlpacaEval benchmark show that the FANNO can generate high-quality data with diversity and complexity for free, comparable to human-annotated or cleaned datasets like Alpaca-GPT4-Cleaned.

Multi-Layer Ranking with Large Language Models for News Source Recommendation

To seek reliable information sources for news events, we introduce a novel task of expert recommendation, which aims to identify trustworthy sources based on their previously quoted statements. To achieve this, we built a novel dataset, called NewsQuote, consisting of 23,571 quote-speaker pairs sourced from a collection of news articles. We formulate the recommendation task as the retrieval of experts based on their likelihood of being associated with a given query. We also propose a multi-layer ranking framework employing Large Language Models to improve the recommendation performance. Our results show that employing an in-context learning based LLM ranker and a multi-layer ranking-based filter significantly improve both the predictive quality and behavioural quality of the recommender system.

PlanGPT: Enhancing Urban Planning with Tailored Language Model and Efficient Retrieval

In the field of urban planning, general-purpose large language models often struggle to meet the specific needs of planners. Tasks like generating urban planning texts, retrieving related information, and evaluating planning documents pose unique challenges. To enhance the efficiency of urban professionals and overcome these obstacles, we introduce PlanGPT, the first specialized Large Language Model tailored for urban and spatial planning. Developed through collaborative efforts with institutions like the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning, PlanGPT leverages a customized local database retrieval framework, domain-specific fine-tuning of base models, and advanced tooling capabilities. Empirical tests demonstrate that PlanGPT has achieved advanced performance, delivering responses of superior quality precisely tailored to the intricacies of urban planning.

NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding

In this paper, we introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives such as novels in an immersive environment. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-like responses, guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. The system incorporates auto-generated visual display of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing user experience. Our approach eschews predefined sandboxes, focusing instead on main storyline events extracted from narratives from the perspective of a user-selected character. NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or improve their favorability with the narrative characters through conversations.

Look Beneath the Surface: Exploiting Fundamental Symmetry for Sample-Efficient Offline RL

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers an appealing approach to real-world tasks by learning policies from pre-collected datasets without interacting with the environment. However, the performance of existing offline RL algorithms heavily depends on the scale and state-action space coverage of datasets. Real-world data collection is often expensive and uncontrollable, leading to small and narrowly covered datasets and posing significant challenges for practical deployments of offline RL. In this paper, we provide a new insight that leveraging the fundamental symmetry of system dynamics can substantially enhance offline RL performance under small datasets. Specifically, we propose a Time-reversal symmetry (T-symmetry) enforced Dynamics Model (TDM), which establishes consistency between a pair of forward and reverse latent dynamics. TDM provides both well-behaved representations for small datasets and a new reliability measure for OOD samples based on compliance with the T-symmetry. These can be readily used to construct a new offline RL algorithm (TSRL) with less conservative policy constraints and a reliable latent space data augmentation procedure. Based on extensive experiments, we find TSRL achieves great performance on small benchmark datasets with as few as 1% of the original samples, which significantly outperforms the recent offline RL algorithms in terms of data efficiency and generalizability.