# Dual-stage Flows-based Generative Modeling for Traceable Urban Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02453 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02453/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07057/) (2017)
- [MADE: Masked Autoencoder for Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03509/) (2015)
- [SRFlow: Learning the Super-Resolution Space with Normalizing Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14200/) (2020)
- [FlowSeq: Non-Autoregressive Conditional Sequence Generation with Generative Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02480/) (2019)
- [Reimagining City Configuration: Automated Urban Planning via Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09912/) (2020)
- [Human-instructed Deep Hierarchical Generative Learning for Automated Urban Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00904/) (2022)
- [Deep Human-guided Conditional Variational Generative Modeling for Automated Urban Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07717/) (2021)
- [Automated Urban Planning for Reimagining City Configuration via Adversarial Learning: Quantification, Generation, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14699/) (2021)
- [Generative AI Meets Future Cities: Towards an Era of Autonomous Urban Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03892/) (2023)

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

- [Towards Urban Planing AI Agent in the Age of Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14730/) (2025)
- [City Editing: Hierarchical Agentic Execution for Dependency-Aware Urban Geospatial Modification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19326/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Urban planning, which aims to design feasible land-use configurations for target areas, has become increasingly essential due to the high-speed urbanization process in the modern era. However, the traditional urban planning conducted by human designers can be a complex and onerous task. Thanks to the advancement of deep learning algorithms, researchers have started to develop automated planning techniques. While these models have exhibited promising results, they still grapple with a couple of unresolved limitations: 1) Ignoring the relationship between urban functional zones and configurations and failing to capture the relationship among different functional zones. 2) Less interpretable and stable generation process. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel generative framework based on normalizing flows, namely Dual-stage Urban Flows (DSUF) framework. Specifically, the first stage is to utilize zone-level urban planning flows to generate urban functional zones based on given surrounding contexts and human guidance. Then we employ an Information Fusion Module to capture the relationship among functional zones and fuse the information of different aspects. The second stage is to use configuration-level urban planning flows to obtain land-use configurations derived from fused information. We design several experiments to indicate that our framework can outperform compared to other generative models for the urban planning task.