TRACE SERIES · REPORT 1

TRACE Residential: Candidate-Then-Verify Wall Recovery from Vector Construction Drawings

ABSTRACT
TRACE (Tokenized Representation of Architectural CAD Elements) is Foreman AI's wall-recovery model for construction drawings. Automated takeoff needs wall geometry that is both spatially correct and metrically useful, and real drawings make that difficult: walls coexist with dimensions, leaders, cabinetry, hatches, schedules, title blocks, multiple drawing regions, and drafting conventions that vary across firms. TRACE turns the vector CAD elements of a PDF into candidate wall tokens and uses compact learned models only to verify them. A 4-direction U-Net wall field (RoomNet) decides where each token behaves like wall; a second network (QuantityNet) predicts token validity, endpoint spans and same-wall affinity; and an ownership merge emits one measurable vector run per accepted span. The two learned models contain about 1.04 million trainable parameters and were trained from scratch on 71 distinct hand-traced residential sheets drawn from our corpus of nearly 98,000 real engineered plans (about 3.6 million pages). Using the same scorer, truth and pages for both systems, TRACE improves the previous production tracer (V1) from 0.7774 to 0.9117 mean geometry F1 on 20 development sheets and is better on 17 of 20 (paired bootstrap mean difference +0.1343, 95% CI [0.074, 0.198]; sign test p = 0.0026). Removing a pixel-identical train/development duplicate leaves 0.9089. On ten development sheets from architect groups absent from training, TRACE scores 0.8787 versus 0.7544 for V1. An eight-sheet external evaluation not used for model selection scores 0.8874 but under-counts total wall footage by 28.2%, separating positional accuracy from takeoff accuracy. Stage diagnostics on the hardest 1/8-inch external sheet show token coverage of 0.962 before learned verification and 0.394 after acceptance, localizing that failure to verification rather than extraction. The results support learned verification of exact PDF geometry as a practical middle ground between brittle drafting rules and end-to-end raster reconstruction, while showing that scale diversity, leakage control, one-to-one scoring and direct footage error remain necessary for a defensible construction benchmark.
construction takeoff · floor-plan understanding · wall recovery · vector geometry · semantic segmentation · document intelligence · measurement validity

1. Introduction

Architectural floor plans are unusually information-dense technical documents. A single sheet can contain wall faces, room labels, dimensions, leader lines, structural grids, door swings, cabinetry, equipment, hatch patterns, schedules, revision clouds and title-block geometry. The elements most relevant to estimating are embedded in a field of visually plausible distractors: a line can be long, straight, dark and architecturally meaningful without being a wall.

The distinction matters because wall length is a multiplier for downstream quantities. Stud counts, top and bottom plate, sheathing, insulation, gypsum board, cladding, blocking and several finish quantities are derived directly or indirectly from recovered wall geometry. A system can produce internally consistent arithmetic while remaining materially wrong if the geometric basis is wrong. Earlier Foreman AI work focused on how such systems should be measured and showed that reported linear footage alone correlates weakly with correct wall recovery, while different recovery engines fail on different sheets [12].

Much of the floor-plan literature begins from raster images and predicts segmentation masks, corners, edges, room polygons or full planar graphs [2, 3, 7, 8, 9]. Those formulations fit when the only input is an image. Construction PDFs, however, often retain exact vector primitives. This creates a different design opportunity: instead of asking a neural network to generate coordinates, deterministic geometry can generate candidate coordinates and learned models can answer the narrower question, which candidates are walls, over what span, and which overlapping candidates describe the same physical wall?

This paper studies that formulation. The resulting system is TRACE, for Tokenized Representation of Architectural CAD Elements: the drawing's own CAD elements become the tokens the models reason over, and every output coordinate is inherited from a token. The contributions are:

  • a candidate-then-verify architecture in which every output coordinate comes from PDF geometry rather than raster quantization;
  • a reconstructed, hash-pinned training and evaluation lineage, including the distinction between development, external-evaluation and training populations;
  • a same-ruler comparison with the previous production tracer (V1) using identical sheets, truth, tolerance, aggregation and scorer; and
  • failure localization showing that several hard cases already contain the correct wall geometry in the token pool, with the dominant loss at learned acceptance or merge rather than extraction.

The paper does not claim state of the art. Published systems use different datasets, tasks and metrics, and the present corpus is proprietary. The objective is to report a reproducible engineering result on real construction drawings, together with the limitations that determine what the result does and does not establish. A companion report adapts TRACE to commercial plans [14].

2. Related work

Automatic floor-plan interpretation spans document analysis, semantic segmentation, vectorization, inverse CAD and structured reconstruction. Liu et al. combined learned junction prediction with integer programming to reconstruct vector floor plans from raster images [2]. CubiCasa5K provided 5,000 densely annotated floor-plan images and a multi-task convolutional baseline for room and symbol parsing [3]. Floor-SP formulated floor-plan recovery as room-wise structured optimization [4], HEAT learned holistic edge classification for planar-graph reconstruction [7], and RoomFormer formulated reconstruction as direct polygon prediction with two-level Transformer queries [9].

Construction-grade blueprints differ from simplified real-estate floor plans in resolution, drafting complexity and density. Song et al. addressed high-definition blueprint vectorization with segmentation, topology reasoning, learned refinement and heuristic simplification on 200 production blueprints [8]. Recent AEC work has explored graph-augmented floor-plan segmentation [10] and semi-supervised wall segmentation with limited labels [11]. These systems reinforce two themes: walls are a structured geometric object rather than merely a pixel class, and labeled data remains a practical constraint.

TRACE differs in three ways. Its input is a vector PDF rather than a raster, so geometric proposals are exact in document coordinates. Its learned networks do not emit final wall coordinates; they verify, trim and de-duplicate tokens produced from the PDF. And the evaluation reports takeoff-oriented quantities such as total wall-footage error alongside a positional score.

(a) every CAD element token on D07
(a) every CAD element token on D07
(b) RoomNet wall field
(b) RoomNet wall field
(c) TRACE · F1 0.966
(c) TRACE · F1 0.966
(d) V1 · F1 0.689
(d) V1 · F1 0.689
foundmissedinvented
Figure 1: Candidate-then-verify on a real development sheet (D07, 1/4"). (a) Every token the PDF's vector geometry proposes. (b) RoomNet's wall field, strongest direction per pixel. (c) The runs TRACE accepts, scored against the hand trace at 1 ft: green = matched, red = missed, orange = invented. (d) V1 on the same page, which misses most of the exterior. This is a scored example, not a schematic.

3. Problem definition and metric

3.1 Input and output

The system receives a vector PDF page and a physical scale expressed as PDF points per foot (ppf). Scale is an input to the evaluated core; the 0.9117 result is not a scale-detection result. The output is a set of vector wall runs in PDF coordinates. The evaluation here is geometry-level and class-agnostic; later production stages assign exterior/interior class and support room and opening workflows.

The reference traces contain wall polylines with four labels: exterior, interior, bearing and open. Bearing is treated as wall geometry in the core benchmark. Open spans represent wall continuation through door and window gaps in the gross convention; a separate net view removes them.

3.2 Length-weighted positional score

The primary metric follows the positional-accuracy idea of Goodchild and Hunter [1]. Prediction and reference linework are sampled every 1.5 PDF points. For tolerance d = 1 physical foot, precision is the length fraction of prediction samples within d of any reference segment, and recall reverses the roles:

P = L(Ĝ within d of G) / L(Ĝ)
R = L(G within d of Ĝ) / L(G)
F1 = 2PR / (P + R)

F1, precision and recall are computed per sheet and macro-averaged. The metric is useful but incomplete: it is not one-to-one, direction-aware or class-aware, so duplicated parallel predictions can stay close enough to reference geometry to receive credit. For estimating, the paper therefore reports aggregate linear-footage over/under and, where available, absolute footage error alongside F1.

4. Dataset and split audit

4.1 Gold corpus

The recovered lineage begins with 112 single-page PDFs paired with hand-traced wall truth, drawn from Foreman AI's corpus of nearly 98,000 real engineered plans (about 3.6 million pages). Seven truth files were later identified as bound to the wrong drawing, leaving 105 clean PDFs. The RoomNet split lists 76 training filenames, but five byte-identical pairs occur within that set, corresponding to 71 distinct PDFs; QuantityNet removes those aliases and uses 71 training sheets. The development set contains 20 vector floor-plan sheets (Fig. 2). Training scales include 60 sheets at 1/4 in. = 1 ft (18 ppf), seven at 3/16 in. (13.5 ppf), eight at 1/8 in. (9 ppf) and one at 3/8 in. (27 ppf); this imbalance becomes relevant in Sec. 9. Figure 4 shows training sheets as the trainers receive them.

dataset lineage
Figure 2: Dataset lineage recovered from the frozen training artifacts. Development sheets were excluded from gradient updates but used repeatedly for model and configuration selection.

4.2 Development-set leakage and group overlap

The development set is not an independent test set. It was used to select the RoomNet checkpoint and threshold, the QuantityNet step and post-processing settings. A later content audit also found one development PDF that renders pixel-identically to a training PDF despite different file bytes and different hand traces. Removing that sheet changes TRACE F1 from 0.9117 to 0.9089. A second development page belongs to the same project as a training page; removing both leaves 18 sheets and F1 0.9070.

Architect and template overlap is also material. Ten of the 20 development sheets belong to architect groups represented in training and ten do not. TRACE scores 0.9447 on the architect-seen half and 0.8787 on the unseen half; V1 scores 0.8004 and 0.7544 on the same groups. With n = 10 per subgroup these values are a diagnostic, not a population estimate.

4.3 External evaluation set

A separate eight-sheet external set represents seven projects. No external PDF hash matches the gold corpus, and the external pages were not used to select QuantityNet. An earlier RoomNet-only model had, however, been scored on these pages before QuantityNet was frozen, and later cleanup work also reviewed them. We therefore call this an external evaluation set, not a pristine blind test.

training sheet A · 1/4"
training sheet A · 1/4"
training sheet B · 3/16"
training sheet B · 3/16"
training sheet C · 1/8" · rotated 270°
training sheet C · 1/8" · rotated 270°
training sheet D · 1/4" · rotated 270°
training sheet D · 1/4" · rotated 270°
exteriorinteriorbearingopening
Figure 4: Four residential training sheets exactly as the trainers receive them: hand-traced centrelines with exterior, interior, bearing and opening labels over the faded drawing. Rotated pages are traced in displayed coordinates.

5. TRACE architecture

TRACE is not an end-to-end raster wall segmenter. It is a sequential pipeline that combines deterministic PDF geometry with learned verification (Fig. 3, Table 5).

TRACE geometry core
Figure 3: TRACE geometry core. Gold boxes are learned components. The 0.9117 benchmark ends after the ownership merge; exterior/interior, cleanup and opening stages (dashed) belong to the production runtime and are not part of that number.

5.1 Token extraction

The PDF is parsed into a bounded set of candidate wall axes, the tokens. Token sources include parallel stroke pairs, merged parallel faces across hatching, filled-region boundaries, clipped-fill boundaries, mixed fill/stroke pairs, stroke-envelope boundaries, junction continuations and endpoint continuations. The adaptive budget is about 300–1,800 tokens per sheet. Final coordinates are inherited from these document-space tokens: learned models determine acceptance and span, never coordinates.

5.2 RoomNet directional field

RoomNet is a compact five-stage U-Net [5] with widths 12–24–48–96–128 and 810,096 trainable parameters. The page is rendered in grayscale at four pixels per physical foot, and the network emits four wall-probability channels for orientation bins centered at 0°, 45°, 90° and 135°. At inference the channel aligned with a token is sampled along it. A median filter of width three smooths the samples; samples at or above 0.90 count as wall, internal gaps up to three feet are bridged, and intervals shorter than 0.5 ft are removed. This compiler converts a dense raster field into one-dimensional accepted spans on exact vector tokens (Fig. 1b).

5.3 QuantityNet

QuantityNet adds 231,588 trainable parameters. For each token it consumes a 5-channel, 17-by-48 profile at eight pixels per foot (grayscale plus the four RoomNet channels, Fig. 6) and 24 numeric features. Its convolutional encoder feeds heads for token validity and normalized start/end span. A pair network receives the symmetric combination of two token embeddings plus eight geometric pair features and predicts whether overlapping tokens belong to the same physical wall. The selected configuration applies a validity veto at 0.30, clips intervals to predicted endpoints, and uses same-wall affinity with a pair threshold of 0.05 to assign each shared span a single owner. The ownership merge suppresses the parallel-face double counting common in thick, hollow and hatched wall representations.

5.4 Downstream stages

Two small MLP heads classify exterior and interior wall geometry, followed by rule-based perimeter and topology passes. On geometry already matched to truth, length-weighted exterior/interior accuracy is 0.9505 on development sheets and 0.9156 on the external set. A separate ResNet18-based detector [6] handles door and window instances. These stages ship in the runtime but do not contribute to the class-agnostic 0.9117 score.

QuantityNet training tokens
Figure 6: Twelve actual QuantityNet training tokens from training sheet A, drawn at random from tokens at least 4 ft long. Each row shows three of the five input channels: ink along the token, RoomNet's field in the token's own direction, and the field across it. Left: tokens labelled wall. Right: tokens labelled not-wall.

6. Training procedure

6.1 RoomNet

RoomNet was trained from random initialization for 3,000 steps with batch size 8. Each step draws random 256-by-256 crops from the 76 training filenames; 70% are centered near a wall pixel and 30% are sampled uniformly. At four pixels per foot each crop spans 64 by 64 physical feet (Fig. 5), and 24,000 crops are sampled over the run. Reference polylines are rasterized 5 pixels thick into one of four direction channels. Augmentation consists of 90-degree rotations, horizontal flips with direction-channel remapping and multiplicative ink-gain variation; the recovered trainer has no scale or line-weight augmentation. The loss is binary cross-entropy with positive weight 6 plus 0.5 times soft Dice, optimized with AdamW at 7×10−4, weight decay 10−3, a 75-step warm-up and cosine decay, in fp16 mixed precision.

input · 64 × 64 ft
input · 64 × 64 ft
target · 4 direction masks
target · 4 direction masks
Figure 5: One actual RoomNet training crop (training sheet A, densest 256-pixel window at 4 px/ft, shown 2×). Orange = 0°, blue = 90° wall masks rasterised 5 px thick.

Twelve checkpoint/threshold combinations were scored on the development set (Table 2, Fig. 7). The numerically highest F1 was 0.9174 at step 3,000 and threshold 0.85, but that setting over-counted aggregate footage by 13.5%. Step 2,000 at threshold 0.90 was selected at lower F1 (0.9026) because its aggregate footage error was +4.8% while precision stayed high.

Table 2: RoomNet checkpoint and threshold selection on the development set (RoomNet with the earlier merge, before QuantityNet). Selected setting in bold.
StepThresholdMean F1PRLF over
1,0000.500.82210.71770.9767+69.0%
2,0000.500.90100.86970.9393+25.1%
2,0000.700.91300.90600.9289+16.1%
2,0000.800.91570.92010.9208+11.5%
2,0000.850.91200.92680.9083+8.9%
2,0000.900.90260.93240.8915+4.8%
3,0000.500.90200.86040.9524+29.4%
3,0000.700.91070.89260.9378+20.0%
3,0000.800.91590.90930.9325+15.4%
3,0000.850.91740.91490.9297+13.5%
3,0000.900.91370.92260.9180+9.7%
3,0000.930.90460.92640.9014+6.2%
RoomNet selection grid
Figure 7: RoomNet selection grid (Table 2). The chosen step-2,000, threshold-0.90 operating point (ringed in navy) gives up about 1.5 F1 points relative to the numerical maximum (ringed in gray, step 3,000 at 0.85) to cut aggregate wall-footage over-count from 13.5% to 4.8%. Step 1,000 (F1 0.822, +69%) is off the axes.

6.2 QuantityNet

QuantityNet was trained from scratch for 8,000 steps with batch size 192 and seed 1701. The training manifest contains 97,500 token examples and 87,513 same-wall pairs (78,811 positive, 8,702 negative); each step samples 192 tokens plus 96 positive and 96 negative pairs, with RoomNet frozen. The loss combines length-weighted validity cross-entropy, span MSE weighted by the matched portion of each token, and overlap-weighted same-wall cross-entropy, optimized with AdamW at 5×10−4, weight decay 5×10−4 and cosine decay to 0.2 times the initial rate. About 25 QuantityNet and merge variants were scored on the same development sheets; step 4,000 with validity veto 0.30 and ownership merge was frozen. The two geometry-critical models together hold about 1.04 million parameters. Data curation, tracing, token engineering, evaluation and failure analysis dominate the development cost, not training.

Table 5: TRACE components. The scored geometry core ends at the ownership merge.
ComponentRoleParameters
Token extractioncandidate wall axes from PDF vectorsdeterministic
RoomNet4-direction wall field, 4 px/ft810,096
Interval compilerfield ≥ 0.90, 3 ft bridge, 0.5 ft minimumdeterministic
QuantityNetvalidity, span, same-wall affinity231,588
Ownership mergeveto 0.30, pair threshold 0.05deterministic
Exterior/interior headsbase MLP + context MLP (downstream)small MLPs
Opening detectorResNet18 instances (downstream)separate

7. Experimental design

7.1 V1 baseline

V1 is the frozen previous production wall tracer, captured by our internal benchmark harness on 2026-08-30. Its outputs combine route-dependent learned and heuristic/vector components. Historical V1 scores cannot be subtracted directly from TRACE because earlier reports used different sheet populations, opening conventions, pooling methods and distance discretizations. The widely repeated “76% to 91%” summary is therefore replaced here with a same-ruler re-score.

7.2 Same-ruler re-score

Frozen V1 and TRACE predictions are scored against the same reference JSON with a byte copy of the TRACE scorer (SHA-256 prefix 41a06055), identical 1-ft tolerance and macro per-sheet aggregation, against both gross and net truth. The gross view includes opening spans and matches TRACE's output contract; the net view removes them and is closer to V1's opening-cut contract. No model was retrained for this comparison. As a secondary uncertainty summary we compute a paired nonparametric bootstrap of the 20 per-sheet gross-F1 differences (200,000 resamples, seed 1701) and a two-sided exact sign test on the 17–3 win count. These statistics describe variation across development sheets; they do not correct the selection bias of Sec. 4.2.

8. Results

8.1 Primary development comparison

On the 20-sheet development set V1 scores 0.7774 mean gross F1 and TRACE 0.9117, a mean paired increase of 0.1343 (bootstrap 95% interval [0.074, 0.198]). TRACE is better on 17 of 20 sheets (exact two-sided sign test p = 0.0026). Precision rises from 0.803 to 0.919 and recall from 0.776 to 0.912; aggregate wall footage moves from −3.4% for V1 to +5.5% for TRACE (Table 1, Fig. 8). The pixel-identical duplicate does not explain the result: removing it reduces TRACE to 0.9089 and the difference to +0.127; removing the same-project page as well leaves 0.9070 and +0.131. Figure 9 shows every sheet; Table 3 lists them.

Table 1: Same-ruler V1 versus TRACE geometry results (mean per-sheet F1 at 1 ft).
PopulationnV1TRACEΔ
Development, gross200.7770.912+0.134
Development, net200.7550.885+0.131
Leak removed, gross190.7820.909+0.127
Leak + same-project removed180.7760.907+0.131
Architect unseen in training100.7540.879+0.124
same-ruler comparison
Figure 8: Same-ruler mean F1. Removing known leakage changes the absolute development level only modestly; the improvement over V1 remains about 0.13 F1.
per-sheet comparison
Figure 9: Per-sheet paired comparison on the 20 development sheets, sorted by TRACE gain. The three V1 wins all occur on pages that V1 processed through one of its three internal routes; the largest TRACE gains occur on pages where V1 used the other two.

8.2 Generalization diagnostics

The architect-group split is useful but small. TRACE scores 0.9447 on the ten development sheets whose architect group appears in training and 0.8787 on the ten that do not; V1 shows the same direction (0.8004 and 0.7544), so some of the gap is plausibly drawing difficulty rather than memorization alone. Because the split was discovered post hoc with ten sheets per group, it is not a formal domain-generalization benchmark.

The eight external sheets yield mean gross F1 0.8874, precision 0.9513 and recall 0.8453. The positional score is encouraging, but total recovered wall footage is 4,834.8 LF against 6,737.5 LF of truth (−28.2%), and only two of eight pages lie within ±5% footage. Removing the single worst external sheet raises the remaining F1 to about 0.924 and removes most of the under-count, so the small set is dominated by one severe outlier (Sec. 9.1).

8.3 Where TRACE improves

TRACE's gain is predominantly recall without a corresponding precision collapse. On the development sheets bearing-wall recall rises from 0.655 to 0.950, exterior from 0.753 to 0.933 and interior from 0.834 to 0.945; opening-span recall rises more modestly, from 0.638 to 0.753 (Fig. 10). The same slices show gains on rotated and non-axis-aligned geometry: recall on 270° pages rises from 0.639 to 0.943, on walls at 40–50° from 0.701 to 0.866, and on walls at least 20 ft long from 0.722 to 0.914 (Table 4). These subsets are small and are diagnostics rather than independent significance tests.

recall by class
Figure 10: Length-weighted recall by reference class on the development set. Geometry scoring is class-agnostic, so these values slice truth by its label but do not score predicted class identity.
Table 4: Length-weighted recall by slice of the development truth. Geometry scoring is class-agnostic; class rows slice truth by its label.
Development sliceTruth LFV1 recallTRACE recall
Walls at 40–50°2730.7010.866
Bearing walls2640.6550.950
Exterior walls4,9000.7530.933
Interior walls4,0760.8340.945
Opening spans1,3120.6380.752
Walls < 3 ft1,1960.7850.884
Walls ≥ 20 ft3,2150.7220.914
3/16" sheets2,0930.7620.928
1/8" sheets8170.8040.962
Pages rotated 270°1,3980.6390.943
Pages rotated 90°1,3660.8500.937

8.4 Positional F1 versus material footage

The strongest reason not to collapse the evaluation into one F1 number is the remaining footage error. Several development sheets score above 0.90 F1 while over-counting wall length by more than 20%: D04 scores 0.941 F1 at +22.2%, and D15 scores 0.948 at +22.2% (Fig. 11). The positional metric considers duplicated nearby lines correct even when they would double-count material.

F1 versus footage error
Figure 11: Development-sheet TRACE geometry F1 versus wall-footage error. The pale band marks ±5% footage. High positional F1 does not guarantee takeoff-grade footage.
Table 3: De-identified per-sheet development results. D07 (bold) is the scored example of Figure 1.
SheetScaleRotationV1 F1TRACE F1TRACE PTRACE RFootage error
D011/4"0°0.7340.9050.9420.871-8.7%
D021/4"0°0.5920.8680.8260.915+14.9%
D033/16"0°0.6170.8030.7510.862+21.0%
D041/4"0°0.6150.9410.8970.989+22.2%
D051/4"270°0.8290.9430.9830.907-7.8%
D061/4"0°0.9930.9480.9720.926-9.4%
D071/4"0°0.6890.9661.0000.935-2.4%
D083/16"0°0.6520.9220.9150.928+0.0%
D091/4"0°0.5760.6110.8430.479-49.5%
D101/4"0°0.8670.9350.9640.908-7.4%
D111/4"0°0.9490.9550.9840.927-1.8%
D121/4"0°0.9120.9180.9140.922+2.2%
D131/4"90°0.9760.9820.9720.992+6.1%
D141/8"0°0.8620.9050.8540.962+27.2%
D153/16"0°0.9730.9480.9070.993+22.2%
D161/4"90°0.9520.9410.8940.994+18.1%
D171/4"90°0.7490.8900.9270.856-1.6%
D181/4"0°0.8980.9420.9660.918-4.7%
D191/4"270°0.5810.9740.9600.989+8.3%
D201/4"270°0.5320.9380.9100.969+11.8%

9. Failure analysis

9.1 A 1/8-inch external failure localizes the bottleneck

The hardest external page is drawn at 1/8 in. = 1 ft (9 ppf). TRACE predicts 1,149.8 LF against 2,640.3 LF of truth, with precision 0.937, recall 0.474 and F1 0.630. The failure is not primarily proposal coverage: raw extraction coverage is 1.000, post-merge coverage 1.000 and ranked/capped token coverage 0.962. After RoomNet-based acceptance, coverage falls to 0.394 and stays at 0.393 after finalization (Fig. 12).

stage coverage
Figure 12: Stage-by-stage truth coverage on the hardest external sheet (1/8 in. = 1 ft). Most reference wall is already represented in the token pool; the dominant loss occurs when learned verification rejects those tokens.

Only eight of 76 RoomNet training filenames are at 1/8-inch scale, and the recovered trainer contains no scale augmentation. Later production experiments showed that a second-scale pass can improve recall on this class, but those were not part of the evaluated model. The single 9-ppf development page (D14) performs well, so scale alone is not a sufficient explanation; the evidence points to an interaction among scale, drafting convention and training distribution rather than a universal 1/8-inch rule.

9.2 In-distribution classification failure

A 1/4-inch development sheet, D09, scores only 0.611 F1 and 0.479 recall even though its token-recall ceiling is 0.888. V1 is also poor on this page (0.576 F1), suggesting a genuinely difficult drawing style. The token evidence again narrows the error to acceptance rather than absence of vector wall proposals.

9.3 Duplicate-face and merge errors

The opposite failure mode is over-recovery. Thick, hatched or compound wall assemblies can generate several plausible parallel tokens. A separate de-duplication audit found substantial overlap among oracle-selected token footage, and Fig. 11 shows pages above +20% wall length despite high F1. This is partly an algorithmic merge problem and partly a benchmark problem: a many-to-one tolerance metric is inherently permissive toward duplicate nearby predictions.

9.4 Exterior/interior and openings

After downstream class heads and topology passes, exterior/interior accuracy on matched geometry is 0.9505 on the development set and 0.9156 on the external set, where errors are dominated by interior wall length labelled exterior on unfamiliar drawings. Opening treatment remains less mature. The geometry core traces through door and window spans; against net truth with openings removed, development F1 falls from 0.9117 to 0.8855 and aggregate footage rises to +20.4%. A fully validated net, billable wall takeoff remains future work.

10. Discussion

The central engineering result is not simply that a small neural model improves a wall benchmark. It is that learned recognition can be inserted at the verification layer while geometry stays deterministic. This preserves exact PDF coordinates, avoids a raster-to-vector conversion stage, and lets learning focus on local and relational evidence: whether a token looks like wall, which part of it is valid, and which parallel tokens are duplicates.

That division of labor suits construction documents. Vector extraction is strong at producing geometrically plausible hypotheses but weak at semantics; raster learning is strong at local appearance and context but blurs coordinates or needs a separate vectorization stage. TRACE combines them. The improvement from 0.777 to 0.912 on the same 20 development pages is large relative to the model size, and it persists when the known duplicate and same-project page are removed.

The external results show why a geometry benchmark must be paired with a measurement benchmark. A system can be spatially close to most reference walls and still under-count the total quantity materially. For estimating, the acceptable error criterion is not merely that the predicted line lies within one foot of a wall, but that the final billable run represents the right physical wall exactly once, at the right scale and class, with openings handled according to the quantity contract.

A second implication is methodological. The development set was used correctly as a development set but was later described informally as “held out.” Repeated selection across thresholds, checkpoints and merge policies produces optimistic estimates even when the development images are excluded from gradient updates, and content-level duplicate detection is necessary: file hashes alone did not catch a pixel-identical train/development pair.

11. Limitations and threats to validity

  1. Development-set selection. The 20-sheet 0.9117 result was used to select RoomNet, QuantityNet and post-processing settings. It is not an independent test estimate.
  2. Leakage. One development sheet is pixel-identical to a training sheet, and another shares a project with training. Cleaned results are reported, but the split was not designed as building- or firm-disjoint.
  3. Small external sample. The eight external sheets represent only seven projects. They were not used to select QuantityNet, but an earlier RoomNet-only model had been scored on them.
  4. Reference noise. Two hand traces of the leaked duplicate drawing differ by about 15% in total wall footage, and seven truth files were excluded because they were bound to the wrong drawing. Inter-annotator reproducibility has not been measured at useful scale.
  5. Metric permissiveness. The 1-ft buffer metric is not one-to-one, direction-aware or class-aware, so parallel duplicates can be rewarded. Footage error is reported separately; future work should add direction constraints and one-to-one matching.
  6. Scale and domain coverage. Residential 1/4-inch plans dominate training; commercial, multi-family and 1/8-inch drawings are under-represented. Report 2 addresses commercial plans [14].
  7. RoomNet reproducibility. The selected checkpoint and training logs are preserved, but the exact launch command and random seed are not; the surviving trainer post-dates the run by two days.
  8. Baseline snapshot. V1 is a frozen production snapshot from 2026-08-30 rather than a family of historical variants.

12. Reproducibility and artifact lineage

Inference and evaluation are reproducible from frozen artifacts. The selected RoomNet checkpoint begins SHA-256 8e06a59fff839ab1, the QuantityNet step-4,000 checkpoint begins ae18a188e4f3086c, and the same-ruler scorer begins 41a0605555583d8f; full hashes are retained in the artifact index. Re-running the frozen TRACE predictions through that scorer reproduced the historical gross development result 0.911720524 exactly and reproduced the 0.8855 net result. QuantityNet's training script, seed, split hash, data-manifest hash and logs are retained; RoomNet's crops, split, log and checkpoints are retained, but its exact launch command and seed remain unresolved. These details are disclosed because a small reproducibility gap can matter when comparisons are on the order of one F1 point.

13. Conclusion

A compact learned verifier over deterministic PDF geometry substantially improves wall recovery. On an identical 20-sheet development population and scorer, TRACE raises mean geometry F1 from 0.7774 to 0.9117, improves 17 of 20 pages, and increases recall across bearing, exterior, interior, rotated, long and angled wall subsets. The result remains about 0.91 after removing known leakage, while the architect-unseen half and the external evaluation land near 0.88–0.89.

The remaining failures are equally important. External wall footage is under-counted, a 1/8-inch sheet loses most of its truth only after learned acceptance, and some high-F1 pages still over-count material by more than 20%. These findings argue for an evaluation standard that treats positional geometry, one-to-one wall identity, scale, class and final linear footage as separate but jointly necessary criteria. The next decisive experiment is not another training run but a new, audited, building-disjoint test set scored once with frozen V1 and TRACE under a one-to-one, direction-aware metric plus direct footage error.

Data availability

The plan sheets come from Foreman AI's proprietary corpus and are not redistributed; sheets are identified by neutral IDs. Frozen model hashes, de-identified per-sheet metrics, scorer identity, split metadata and aggregate results are retained by Foreman AI Research.

Competing interests

Kyle Rossignol is the founder of Foreman AI LLC, which develops commercial construction-estimating software incorporating the wall-recovery technology described here. This manuscript reports internal research and should be interpreted with that relationship disclosed.

Funding

The work was conducted as internal research and development by Foreman AI LLC. No external research funding is reported in the experiment record.

Author contributions

K.R. conceived the construction-measurement problem, created or directed the wall-reference workflow, developed the Foreman AI system and research program, and prepared the underlying experimental record. The figures and this edition of the manuscript were prepared with Claude (Anthropic), an AI model, under K.R.'s direction.

References

  1. M. F. Goodchild and G. J. Hunter, “A simple positional accuracy measure for linear features,” International Journal of Geographical Information Science, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 299–306, 1997. doi:10.1080/136588197242419.
  2. C. Liu, J. Wu, P. Kohli, and Y. Furukawa, “Raster-To-Vector: Revisiting Floorplan Transformation,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pp. 2195–2203, 2017.
  3. A. Kalervo, J. Ylioinas, M. Häikiö, A. Karhu, and J. Kannala, “CubiCasa5K: A Dataset and an Improved Multi-Task Model for Floorplan Image Analysis,” arXiv:1904.01920, 2019.
  4. J. Chen, C. Liu, J. Wu, and Y. Furukawa, “Floor-SP: Inverse CAD for Floorplans by Sequential Room-Wise Shortest Path,” in Proc. IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pp. 2661–2670, 2019.
  5. O. Ronneberger, P. Fischer, and T. Brox, “U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation,” in Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), pp. 234–241, 2015.
  6. K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, “Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition,” in Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 770–778, 2016.
  7. J. Chen, Y. Qian, and Y. Furukawa, “HEAT: Holistic Edge Attention Transformer for Structured Reconstruction,” in Proc. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 3866–3875, 2022.
  8. W. Song, M. M. Abyaneh, M. A. A. Shabani, and Y. Furukawa, “Vectorizing Building Blueprints,” in Proc. Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), pp. 1044–1059, 2022.
  9. Y. Yue, T. Kontogianni, K. Schindler, and F. Engelmann, “Connecting the Dots: Floorplan Reconstruction Using Two-Level Queries,” in Proc. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 845–854, 2023.
  10. J. Knechtel, P. Rottmann, J.-H. Haunert, and Y. Dehbi, “Semantic floorplan segmentation using self-constructing graph networks,” Automation in Construction, vol. 166, 105649, 2024. doi:10.1016/j.autcon.2024.105649.
  11. H. Xie, X. Ma, Q. Mei, and Y. H. Chui, “A semi-supervised approach for building wall layout segmentation based on transformers and limited data,” Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, vol. 40, pp. 1295–1313, 2025. doi:10.1111/mice.13397.
  12. K. Rossignol, “Measurement Practice for Automated Wall Recovery from Architectural Permit Drawings,” Foreman AI Research, Colorado, USA, technical report, Aug. 2026.
  13. K. Rossignol, “AI-Augmented Plan Review: Practical Lessons from the Field,” PM World Journal, vol. XV, no. I, Jan. 2026.
  14. K. Rossignol, “TRACE Commercial: Adapting Wall Recovery to Commercial Floor Plans,” Foreman AI Research, TRACE Series Report 2, Colorado, USA, Sep. 2026.