Conflated Inverse Modeling to Generate Diverse and Temperature-Change Inducing Urban Vegetation Patterns

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel inverse modeling framework that generates diverse urban vegetation patterns to achieve specific temperature goals, aiding climate adaptation.

Contribution

It combines a forward predictive model with a diffusion-based generative inverse model to produce multiple plausible vegetation configurations conditioned on temperature targets.

Findings

Produces diverse vegetation patterns matching temperature goals

Maintains control over thermal outcomes despite data scarcity

Enables physically plausible solutions even for unseen configurations

Abstract

Urban areas are increasingly vulnerable to thermal extremes driven by rapid urbanization and climate change. Traditionally, thermal extremes have been monitored using Earth-observing satellites and numerical modeling frameworks. For example, land surface temperature derived from Landsat or Sentinel imagery is commonly used to characterize surface heating patterns. These approaches operate as forward models, translating radiative observations or modeled boundary conditions into estimates of surface thermal states. While forward models can predict land surface temperature from vegetation and urban form, the inverse problem of determining spatial vegetation configurations that achieve a desired regional temperature shift remains largely unexplored. This task is inherently underdetermined, as multiple spatial vegetation patterns can yield similar aggregated temperature responses. Conventional regression and deterministic neural networks fail to capture this ambiguity and often produce averaged solutions, particularly under data-scarce conditions. We propose a conflated inverse modeling framework that combines a predictive forward model with a diffusion-based generative inverse model to produce diverse, physically plausible image-based vegetation patterns conditioned on specific temperature goals. Our framework maintains control over thermal outcomes while enabling diverse spatial vegetation configurations, even when such combinations are absent from training data. Altogether, this work introduces a controllable inverse modeling approach for urban climate adaptation that accounts for the inherent diversity of the problem. Code is available at the GitHub repository.