Crab Research
Procedural generation

Which Structural Constraints Are Learnable? A Regime Map for a Minecraft Voxel Generator

Li, Alex Chengyu

PublishedFirst public Revised

Overview

An empirical regime map of which structural constraints a Minecraft voxel generator can learn.

Original abstract (English)

Neural procedural content generation (PCG) systems produce 3D game content, but practitioners lack guidance on which structural constraints their generator will enforce. We condition a VQ-VAE plus autoregressive transformer with classifier-free guidance on six discretized structural tokens, generate new Minecraft buildings (323 voxel grids, 513 remapped block tokens), and measure 14 output properties. The properties separate into three regimes: Controllable (9 properties, >100% relative shift; 7 confident), Approachable (4, 20-100%), and Unresponsive (1, <20%). The product of effective signal and training CV correlates with relative responsiveness for emergent properties (Spearman rho=0.879, p=0.002, n=10); the small sample limits predictive generalization. Varying the guidance scale helps diagnose representation ceilings versus frequency floors, giving practitioners a diagnostic before expensive retraining.

Public abstract source

Computer ScienceProcedural generationconstraint learnabilitycontrollabilityprocedural content generationdiscrete generative modelsVQ-VAEautoregressive transformerMinecraft
Back to Computer Science