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Growing a Stand, Not a Tree: Joint Canopy Generation Reproduces Crown Shyness

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 27, 2026 · UTC

In closed forests, neighboring tree crowns often stop short of touching, leaving a network of narrow gaps known as crown shyness. The pattern belongs to the stand rather than to any single tree, which makes it a natural probe of a question in generative modeling: can a learned model produce a set of objects whose defining structure exists only between them? We formulate stand-level canopy generation as set generation with a flow-matching model, in which attention between trees is the only channel through which coupling can arise. Trained on stands grown by a resource-competition simulation tha

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