CADFit: Precise Mesh-to-CAD Program Generation with Hybrid Optimization

Reconstructing Computer-Aided Design (CAD) modeling sequences from images is crucial for preserving design intent and supporting parametric editing. However, existing methods typically generate full CAD sequences holistically, overlooking the iterative, feedback-driven nature of human design workflows. We address this limitation by introducing the rich stepwise visual supervision: at each modeling step, the system observes the target's orthographic projections, the projections of the incrementally constructed model, and the active sketch, enabling informed action selection. To effectively leverage this on-the-fly feedback, we propose SOV-CAD, a framework that formulates CAD reconstruction as a sequential decision-making task and employs offline reinforcement learning with a Decision Transformer architecture. This design incorporates continuous visual feedback guided by geometric alignment rewards, resulting in a more accurate and human-like modeling process. Extensive experiments show that SOV-CAD surpasses state-of-the-art methods in CAD sequence reconstruction while exhibiting strong data efficiency. Code of SOV-CAD is available at: https://github.com/LukePhong/SOV-CAD

Recovering editable CAD programs from images or 3D observations is central to AI-assisted design, but progress is difficult to measure because existing evaluations are fragmented across datasets, modalities, and metrics. We introduce CADBench, a unified benchmark for multimodal CAD program generation. CADBench contains 18,000 evaluation samples spanning six benchmark families derived from DeepCAD, Fusion 360, ABC, MCB, and Objaverse; five input modalities including clean meshes, noisy meshes, single-view renders, photorealistic renders, and multi-view renders; and six metrics covering geometric fidelity, executability, and program compactness. STEP-based families are stratified by B-rep face count and all families are diversity-sampled to support controlled analysis across complexity and object variation. We benchmark eleven CAD-specialized and general-purpose vision-language systems, generating more than 1.4 million CAD programs. Under idealized inputs, specialized mesh-to-CAD models substantially outperform code-generating VLMs, which remain far from reliable CAD program reconstruction. CADBench further reveals three recurring failure modes: reconstruction quality degrades with geometric complexity, CAD-specialized models can be brittle under modality shift, and model rankings change across metrics. Together, these results position CADBench as a diagnostic testbed for measuring progress in editable 3D reconstruction and multimodal CAD understanding. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/anniedoris/CADBench.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) underpins modern engineering, yet converting existing shapes into editable models still demands substantial expert effort. Most AI systems emit the entire CAD program in a single pass, never inspecting the intermediate geometry. In contrast, human engineers build a part feature by feature, checking after each operation what remains to be modeled. We introduce CADENA (Spanish for "chain"), a model that reconstructs a 3D mesh as a parametric CAD program, growing its sequence of operations one at a time and comparing the target with the currently predicted geometry at every step. We also address the lack of benchmarks for evaluating reverse-engineering methods on mechanical parts, introducing CADENA-Bench, a benchmark that measures performance across categories of mechanical parts. CADENA outperforms prior methods on CADENA-Bench and on the DeepCAD, Fusion 360, and MCB datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/zhemdi/cadena, model weights at https://huggingface.co/kulibinai/cadena, and CADENA-Bench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/kulibinai/cadena-bench.