Authors: Honghu Pan, Zibo Du, Daxiang Liu, Chengliang Liu, Xiaoling Luo
Organizations: School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University · College of Computer Science and Software Engineer, Shenzhen University · Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau
Text-based retrieval of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models is a critical yet underexplored task for the reuse of legacy industrial designs. Existing CAD repositories are typically searched using filenames or directories, which limits the efficiency, scalability, and accuracy of design retrieval. In this paper, we formally introduce text-to-CAD retrieval as a new cross-modal retrieval task, aiming to retrieve semantically relevant CAD models from large-scale databases given natural language queries. Leveraging paired text-CAD annotations from the Text2CAD dataset, we establish a practical benchmark for this task. To achieve text-based retrieval, we propose a unified framework that learns multi-modal CAD embeddings from both procedural sequences and geometric point clouds. Specifically, a sequence encoder captures the construction logic of CAD models, while a point encoder extracts explicit geometric features. A text encoder is used to learn semantic representations of textual queries. During training, we introduce a novel feature decoder that reconstructs masked sequence features via cross-attention with text and point features, encouraging implicit multi-modal alignment. At inference time, we remove this auxiliary decoder to enable efficient retrieval using concatenated sequence-point features. Our framework serves as a strong baseline for text-to-CAD retrieval and lays the foundation for downstream CAD generation paradigms, such as retrieval-augmented generation. The source code will be released.
Text-to-CAD has recently emerged as an important task with the potential to substantially accelerate design workflows. Despite its significance, there has been surprisingly little work on Text-to-CAD evaluation, and assessing CAD model generation performance remains a considerable challenge. In this work, we introduce a new evaluation perspective for Text-to-CAD based on automated testing. We propose CADTestBench, the first test-based benchmark for Text-to-CAD, based on CADTests, executable software tests that verify whether a generated CAD model satisfies the geometric and topological requirements of the input prompt. Using CADTestBench, we conduct comprehensive benchmarking of recent Text-to-CAD methods and further demonstrate that CADTests can also guide CAD model generation, yielding simple baselines that surpass performance of current methods. CADTestBench code and data are available at GitHub and Hugging Face dataset.
Dimitrios Mallis, Marco Wang, Ahmet Serdar Karadeniz +3
Text-to-3D systems can now synthesize a model from a single sentence, yet the result is a shape to render, not a design to edit. We present Arko-T, a 4B-parameter text-to-design model that maps natural-language intent directly into executable, parametric CAD programs. Rather than optimizing for code executability alone, Arko-T aligns every stage of the pipeline to a formal notion of design state, so that data curation, code normalization, and execution-grounded supervision all work to preserve the features, parameters, and construction logic that make a CAD artifact editable. Benchmarked against seven frontier LLMs across 12 metrics, Arko-T attains the best score on 8 and the second-best on 3 more, at roughly one-tenth the per-benchmark cost. The results suggest that targeted design-level training at moderate scale can match frontier general-purpose models on structured CAD generation.
Multi-modal approaches used for 3D CAD generation require substantial computational resources, necessitating efficient training. To address this, we propose GuideCAD, which leverages semantically rich visual-textual representations having only a small number of trainable parameters to generate 3D CAD models. Specifically, GuideCAD uses a mapping network that converts image embeddings into prefix embeddings, enabling a pretrained large language model to integrate visual and textual information. As a result, a transformer-based decoder predicts the construction sequence using the visual-textual embeddings in order to generate the 3D CAD model. For experimental evaluation, we construct a new dataset, referred to as GuideCAD, which consists of text-image pairs. Each pair includes a text prompt that represents a 3D CAD construction sequence and its corresponding 3D CAD image. Our experimental results show that GuideCAD generates comparably high-quality 3D CAD models while using approximately four times fewer parameters and achieving twice the training efficiency compared to fine-tuning approaches. We have released the source code and dataset for our method at: https://github.com/mskimS2/GuideCAD