aiqbench analysis
StepCAD advances AI-assisted design by using large language models to generate executable CAD code from 3D meshes, significantly improving geometric reconstruction accuracy and operation diversity. The method introduces ARCADE-1.5M, a massive dataset of over 1.5 million CAD programs, which serves as critical infrastructure for training future generative modeling agents in engineering workflows. This research demonstrates how combining policy-based generation with geometry-guided search can overcome the limitations of single-pass prediction in complex manufacturing tasks.
StepCAD: Mesh-to-CAD Code Generation via LLM Policy and Geometry-Guided Search
arXiv:2610.03799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering executable CAD programs from 3D meshes is challenging due to the compositional nature of CAD construction and the interaction between discrete modeling choices and continuous parameters. Many learning-based methods predict complete programs in a single pass and rely predominantly on sketch-extrude representations, limiting operation diversity and opportunities to correct geometric errors during reconstruction. We introduce StepCAD, a generative optimization approach that combines a state-conditioned CAD policy with geometry-guided search. Given an input mesh, the policy predicts construction actions conditioned on both target and intermediate geometry, and an IoU-guided tree search refines the resulting program through local edits. We also introduce ARCADE-1.5M, a large-scale dataset of 1.5M executable CAD programs spanning diverse operations, sequences with a maximum length of 150+ counted operations, and 12.5M intermediate state-action transitions. Experiments across multiple CAD reconstruction benchmarks show that StepCAD achieves state-of-the-art geometric reconstruction accuracy with consistently high validity, yielding up to 87.2% relative IoU improvement over the strongest evaluated baseline, with particularly large gains on complex shapes. Project page: https://ghadinehme.com/stepcad.github.io/
Abstract:Recovering executable CAD programs from 3D meshes is challenging due to the compositional nature of CAD construction and the interaction between discrete modeling choices and continuous parameters. Many learning-based methods predict complete programs in a single pass and rely predominantly on sketch-extrude representations, limiting operation diversity and opportunities to correct geometric errors during reconstruction. We introduce StepCAD, a generative optimization approach that combines a state-conditioned CAD policy with geometry-guided search. Given an input mesh, the policy predicts construction actions conditioned on both target and intermediate geometry, and an IoU-guided tree search refines the resulting program through local edits. We also introduce ARCADE-1.5M, a large-scale dataset of 1.5M executable CAD programs spanning diverse operations, sequences with a maximum length of 150+ counted operations, and 12.5M intermediate state-action transitions. Experiments across multiple CAD reconstruction benchmarks show that StepCAD achieves state-of-the-art geometric reconstruction accuracy with consistently high validity, yielding up to 87.2% relative IoU improvement over the strongest evaluated baseline, with particularly large gains on complex shapes. Project page: this https URL
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2610.03799 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2610.03799v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.03799 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 269 words
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