One-Hot Walls, LLaMA Doors: Teaching AI the Language of Buildings
A wall is rarely just a wall. In a building information model, “core wall,” “perimeter wall,” “loadbearing retaining wall,” “roof parapet,” and “balcony parapet wall” are not interchangeable administrative labels. They sit inside a professional language shaped by structure, function, construction sequence, cost responsibility, design intent, and downstream operational meaning. But many supervised AI models still learn these categories through one-hot encoding. Forty-two subtypes become forty-two orthogonal switches. One cell is turned on; forty-one are turned off. Congratulations: “core wall” is now mathematically as unrelated to “perimeter wall” as it is to “haunch.” Somewhere, a structural engineer silently closes the laptop. ...