architectural software developers

Abstract: Multimodal models increasingly interpret visual environments, but their ability to recognize the same building across photographs, floor plans, elevations, sections, and renderings remains poorly characterized. We introduce ARCH-B, a benchmark of 354 four-choice questions across 11 cross-representational archetypes, constructed from a building-linked corpus of 3.9 million architectural images using visually similar distractors, model-guided difficulty screening, and manual validation. We evaluate 25 multimodal models and collect 5,830 responses from non-expert human participants. Model accuracy ranges from 10.45% to 83.90%, compared with a human baseline of 35.35%. Models perform comparatively well on mixed-representation outlier detection and photograph matching, but remain weaker on floorplan-to-photograph correspondence. Human and model difficulty across archetypes is only weakly correlated (Spearman's (ρ=0.33)). Held-out evaluation confirms that the difficulty identified during screening generalizes beyond the curation models. ARCH-B provides a diagnostic evaluation of visual correspondence and representation transfer across architectural media.

Abstract: Architectural drawings encode material classes through repeated hatch patterns. We test whether a connectome-constrained fly visual network, pretrained for motion, can be repurposed without task-specific weight updates as a descriptor for one-shot hatch matching. Each 64 x 64 patch is translated over eight scan trajectories and summarized across 57 cell types; query descriptors are then matched to one legend strip per class. On 400 development sheets from a synthetic benchmark built on CubiCasa5K geometry, the frozen fly pipeline reaches 0.857 area-weighted accuracy and 0.910 with an extended legend. On an equal-brightness orientation condition it reaches 0.840 versus 0.299 for eleven pixel statistics, while a Gabor bank reaches 0.900. Replacing drift with a repeated still frame lowers the combined equal-condition score by 0.089 [0.066, 0.112]. However, a receptors-only descriptor reaches 0.891 and a task-trained 5,888-parameter CNN averages 0.959, so the current evidence supports transfer and the usefulness of active sampling, but not an advantage of the biological wiring. We separate project-recorded results from recomputed checks and report a small real-drawing audit. The supported claim is therefore narrow: motion-oriented biological vision can be repurposed as a useful texture representation for architectural hatch matching, while the topology contribution and end-to-end BIM utility remain open questions.