Yes, it's absolutely related to that! Arunpreet is doing very cool stuff, though I didn't know about it when I first started trying out the concepts for this project. The difference is that GroundCollapse re-implements something similar to WFC in a standard constraint solver (clingo, with ASP), rather than trying to extend the original WFC algorithm. That paper notes a significant increase in conflicts due to the extra constraints, which standard WFC doesn't have very good ways to recover from (though I believe some folks are working on that problem). With a standard constraint solver, however, we get backtracking and conflict resolution, which can be slower, but guarantees a solution if one exists (and if you wait long enough).
More directly, GroundCollapse is very much inspired by two works, and I got the authors' permissions to adapt some snippets of constraint code from these. (I credit them in the code for the project):
Karth, Isaac, and Adam M. Smith. 2017. “WaveFunctionCollapse Is Constraint Solving in the Wild.” In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 68. ACM.
Nelson, Mark J., and Adam M. Smith. 2016. “ASP with Applications to Mazes and Levels.” In Procedural Content Generation in Games, 143–157. Springer.
Also, I'm very excited about this follow-up by Isaac and Adam from FDG this year. It has many cool insights about parallels between WFC and PCGML, and on how mixed initiative tools can communicate better with designers:
Karth, Isaac, and Adam M. Smith. 2019. “Addressing the Fundamental Tension of PCGML with Discriminative Learning.” In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 89. ACM.