# Large-Scale Auto-Regressive Modeling Of Street Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00281/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 101 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (2016)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [NVAE: A Deep Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03898/) (2020)
- [GraphRNN: Generating Realistic Graphs with Deep Auto-regressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08773/) (2018)
- [MolGAN: An implicit generative model for small molecular graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11973/) (2018)
- [GraphVAE: Towards Generation of Small Graphs Using Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03480/) (2018)
- [Axial Attention in Multidimensional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12180/) (2019)
- [Ladder Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02282/) (2016)
- [A Structured Self-attentive Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03130/) (2017)
- [GraphAF: a Flow-based Autoregressive Model for Molecular Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09382/) (2020)
- [Grammar Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01925/) (2017)
- [PolyGen: An Autoregressive Generative Model of 3D Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10880/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [RoBus: A Multimodal Dataset for Controllable Road Networks and Building Layouts Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07835/) (2024)
- [Deep autoregressive modeling for land use land cover](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01395/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel generative method for the creation of city-scale road layouts. While the output of recent methods is limited in both size of the covered area and diversity, our framework produces large traversable graphs of high quality consisting of vertices and edges representing complete street networks covering 400 square kilometers or more. While our framework can process general 2D embedded graphs, we focus on street networks due to the wide availability of training data. Our generative framework consists of a transformer decoder that is used in a sliding window manner to predict a field of indices, with each index encoding a representation of the local neighborhood. The semantics of each index is determined by a dictionary of context vectors. The index field is then input to a decoder to compute the street graph. Using data from OpenStreetMap, we train our system on whole cities and even across large countries such as the US, and finally compare it to the state of the art.