Organizations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University · Engineering Research Center of Machine Learning and Industry Intelligence, Ministry of Education · Dongfang Electric (Chengdu) Innovation Research Co., Ltd. · Southwest China Research Institute of Electronic Equipment
Generative modeling for Computer-Aided Design (CAD) remains fundamentally challenged by the need to capture the intricate interplay between discrete topological connectivity and precise spatial geometry inherent in Boundary Representations (B-reps). Existing generative approaches largely formulate CAD construction as a sequence modeling problem, but consequently lack an explicit topological inductive bias. In this work, we present GraphCAD, a geometry-aware generative framework that centers modeling on the Edge-Adjacency Graph (EAG), a novel graph-based CAD representation tailored for generative tasks. GraphCAD adopts a hybrid graph diffusion formulation to jointly model the discrete and continuous components of EAG and introduces a geometry-aware denoising mechanism that renders node attributes into spatial point sets. These point sets are encoded by an SE(3)-equivariant backbone and fused into the node representations, thereby grounding the generative process in physical geometry. To support this study, we construct EAGBench, a large-scale dataset of engineering CAD models. Extensive experiments show that GraphCAD can generate complex CAD models with more than 50 faces and achieves state-of-the-art performance in geometric fidelity and distributional alignment compared with sequence-based baselines.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Construction of the Edge-Adjacency Graph (EAG) representation. (a) A Boundary Representation (B-rep) of a CAD solid. (b) Construction of the Edge-Adjacency Graph, where each graph node corresponds to a topological edge in the B-rep and graph edges indicate shared B-rep vertices. (c) The EAG representation with node attributes, where each node encodes the curve type together with compact analytic geometric parameters.
Figure 2. Overview of the GraphCAD framework. Top: The generative pipeline. The model synthesizes CAD models by iteratively denoising the Edge-Adjacency Graph (EAG), our proposed topological representation of B-rep geometry. Bottom: The Geometry-Aware Denoising module. Unlike standard graph-based methods that treat node attributes as abstract vectors, our approach explicitly “ renders ” these attributes into spatial point sets through “ Curve Sampling ”. The sampled point sets are then processed by an SE(3)-equivariant Vector Neuron backbone to extract rotation-robust geometric embeddings.
Figure 3. Relationship between sketch-and-extrude CAD and the EAG representation. EAG encodes the resulting line, arc, and circle boundary primitives as typed nodes, while graph edges capture their topological adjacency.
Model
Deg ↓
Clus ↓
Orb ↓
Validity ↑
Uniqueness ↑
Novelty ↑
EAGBench-DC
GraphNVP
0.836
0.749
1.634
52.79
89.79
81.96
GDSS
0.659
0.721
1.310
80.08
85.21
79.50
ConGress
0.313
0.399
0.559
71.97
91.20
85.18
DiGress
0.242
0.383
0.183
95.31
93.42
89.34
GraphCAD (Ours)
0.176
0.248
0.120
98.05
95.76
92.21
Table 1. Quantitative evaluation of unconditional generation across two benchmarks. We measure distributional alignment between generated and reference Edge-Adjacency Graphs (EAGs) using maximum mean discrepancy over node degree ( Deg ), clustering coefficient ( Clus ), and orbit counts ( Orb ). Generative quality is further evaluated in terms of Validity , Uniqueness , and Novelty . Best results are shown in bold .
Figure 4. Visual categorization of the primary failure modes encountered during EAG-to-B-rep reconstruction.
Figure 5. Unconditional generation results on the EAGBench dataset. GraphCAD generates realistic CAD models with complex geometry and topology.
EAGBench-DC
EAGBench-FS
Model
IR ↓
CD ↓
HD ↓
JSD ↓
MMD ↓
IR ↓
CD ↓
HD ↓
JSD ↓
MMD ↓
Sequence-based
Transformer ( Vaswani et al., 2017 )
12.02
11.83
0.48
83.94
4.02
19.11
17.51
0.81
84.01
5.33
DeepCAD ( Wu et al., 2021 )
9.29
6.76
0.51
98.40
4.25
13.07
14.98
0.79
92.53
5.91
Text2CAD ( Khan et al., 2024b )
3.87
3.36
0.45
59.63
3.98
8.29
4.62
0.63
70.38
4.78
TGBFN ( Zheng et al., 2025 )
0.78
2.34
0.37
65.92
3.40
6.48
5.35
0.72
74.73
5.08
Table 2. Quantitative comparison of conditional generation. We evaluate reconstructed B-rep models in terms of topological validity (IR), geometric fidelity (CD, HD), and distributional quality (JSD, MMD). Note: For readability, CD, JSD, and MMD are each reported after scaling by 102 within the [−1,1]3 unit cube.
Graph Metrics
CAD Metrics
Model
Deg ↓
Clus ↓
Orb ↓
Validity ↑
Uniqueness ↑
Novelty ↑
CD ↓
HD ↓
JSD ↓
MMD ↓
Full Method (Ours)
0.164
0.236
0.119
98.33
96.71
90.38
1.73
0.28
33.22
1.97
w/o SE(3) Equivariance
0.234
0.377
0.166
97.27
93.98
89.16
2.17
0.44
42.37
2.67
w/o Loss Masking
0.316
0.395
0.582
73.17
92.11
88.46
2.48
0.51
47.56
2.93
w/o Geometric Rendering
0.352
0.411
0.612
66.45
87.93
80.38
5.70
0.66
67.23
3.62
Table 3. Ablation study on the EAGBench-DC dataset evaluating the contribution of individual components in GraphCAD. We compare the full model with variants that remove the SE(3)-equivariant backbone ( w/o SE(3) Equivariance ), semantic loss masking ( w/o Loss Masking ), and point-based geometric rendering ( w/o Geometric Rendering ).
Points ( K )
Computational Cost
Generation Quality
VRAM (GB)
Time (s)
IR ( ↓ )
CD ( ↓ )
0
4.40 ± 0.03
131 ± 1
27.59
5.47
10
4.60 ± 0.02
145 ± 2
2.52
2.81
20
4.64 ± 0.02
146 ± 1
2.67
2.23
50
4.93 ± 0.01
149 ± 2
1.84
2.29
100
5.06 ± 0.03
151 ± 2
1.78
1.94
Table 4. Impact of point sampling density ( K ). Trade-off between inference computational cost and generation quality on EAGBench-DC. Computational cost is measured on a single batch of 256 samples.
Figure 6. Qualitative comparison of CAD models from conditional generation. From top to bottom, we show results produced by DeepCAD, Text2CAD, TGBFN, BrepGiff, our proposed GraphCAD, and the Ground Truth (GT).
Boundary representation (B-rep) is the standard 3D modeling format in CAD systems, encoding both geometric primitives and topological connectivity. Despite its prevalence, deep generative modeling of valid B-rep structures remains challenging due to the intricate interplay between discrete topology and continuous geometry. In this paper, we propose HiDiGen, a hierarchical generation framework that decouples geometry modeling into two stages, each guided by explicitly modeled topological constraints. Specifically, our approach first establishes face-edge incidence relations to define a coherent topological scaffold, upon which face proxies and initial edge curves are generated. Subsequently, multiple Transformer-based diffusion modules are employed to refine the geometry by generating precise face surfaces and vertex positions, with edge-vertex adjacencies dynamically established and enforced to preserve structural consistency. This progressive geometry hierarchy enables the generation of more novel and diverse shapes, while two-stage topological modeling ensures high validity. Experimental results show that HiDiGen achieves strong performance, generating novel, diverse, and topologically sound CAD models.
Shurui Liu, Weide Chen, Ancong Wu
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China · School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, China
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) relies on structured and editable geometric representations, yet existing generative methods are constrained by small annotated datasets with explicit design histories or boundary representation (BRep) labels. Meanwhile, millions of unannotated 3D meshes remain untapped, limiting progress in scalable CAD generation. To address this, we propose DreamCAD, a multi-modal generative framework that directly produces editable BReps from point-level supervision, without CAD-specific annotations. DreamCAD represents each BRep as a set of parametric patches (e.g., Bézier surfaces) and uses a differentiable tessellation method to generate meshes. This enables large-scale training on 3D datasets while reconstructing connected and editable surfaces. Furthermore, we introduce CADCap-1M, the largest CAD captioning dataset to date, with 1M+ descriptions generated using GPT-5 for advancing text-to-CAD research. DreamCAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on ABC and Objaverse benchmarks across text, image, and point modalities, improving geometric fidelity and surpassing 75% user preference. Code and dataset will be publicly available.
Mohammad Sadil Khan, Muhammad Usama, Rolandos Alexandros Potamias +4
DFKI, Germany · RPTU Kaiserslautern, Germany · Imperial College London, United Kingdom +1
Recent deep learning approaches seek to automate CAD creation by representing a model as a sequence of discrete commands and parameters, and then generating them using autoregressive models or continuous diffusion operating in Euclidean embedding space. However, continuous diffusion perturbs representations in a continuous Euclidean domain that does not reflect the inherently discrete and heterogeneous nature of CAD tokens, often producing perturbed representations that map to semantically invalid symbols. To overcome this limitation, we propose a cascaded discrete diffusion framework for CAD generation, which consists of a command diffusion for generating CAD commands and a parameter diffusion conditioned on CAD commands. Unlike isotropic Gaussian perturbation, the forward process of our approach operates directly over categorical token distributions using delicate transition matrices. For commands, we adopt an absorbing-state transition matrix that progressively corrupts tokens to a designated symbol; for parameters, we introduce specific transition matrices tailored to heterogeneous attributes: a Gaussian kernel for coordinate continuity, a scale-invariant kernel for dimensional values, and a prior-preserving kernel for boolean attributes. The reverse process is achieved by two denoising networks: a Transformer-based encoder for command recovery, and a parameter network with extra local self-attention for command-level interaction and cross-attention for conditional injection. Experiments on the DeepCAD dataset show that the proposed approach surpasses existing autoregressive and continuous diffusion models on unconditional generation metrics, while qualitative results validate effective controllability in conditional generation tasks. Source codes will be released.
Honghu Pan, Xiaoling Luo, Yongyong Chen +2
School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University · College of Computer Science and Software Engineer, Shenzhen University · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen +1