FLOORA: A Human-Aligned Domain-Specific Language Model for Architectural Design
Sahand Rezaei-Shoshtari, Patryk Wozniczka, Shu Ishida, Gregg Streuber, Farnoosh Javadi, Jeffrey Landes, Angela Ju, Muhammad Azam, Bryan Lim, Johan Luttun, Indrajeet Haldar, Jonathan Shaw, Beatriz Guerra, Ivan Sosnovik, James Stoddart, Robert Giaquinto, Adam Gaier
Abstract
Foundation models are powerful generators, but many engineering domains require structured representations that general-purpose systems handle poorly. We introduce FLOORA (Floor Layout Optimization with RL Alignment), a family of small domain-specific language (DSL) models for architectural layout generation. With specialized data and alignment, our 0.6B model outperforms much larger frontier models, achieving VLM judge win rates up to 92.0% on out-of-distribution real-world buildings and 96.0% on synthetic buildings. Human evaluations further corroborate these results, with FLOORA selected as the best model in 89.3% of evaluations. FLOORA combines a token-efficient DSL, custom tokenization, domain-specific pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL) with learned human-preference and verifiable rewards. This pipeline improves architectural and geometric validity, supported by extensive empirical evaluation and ablation studies. Although focused on architecture, our results suggest that similar domain-specific recipes may be useful in other engineering domains with structured, verifiable outputs. Datasets, models, and inference code are available at https://github.com/AutodeskAILab/floora.