ArtisanCAD is a skill-guided industrial CAD agent with expert-grounded knowledge distillation that enables expert CATIA recordings to be distilled into reusable skills, allowing ArtisanCAD to generate editable CATIA-native B-Rep models for new variant requests.
Abstract
Computer-aided design (CAD) for industrial components requires long-horizon procedural modeling, robust feature dependencies, editable parametric geometry, and production-grade B-Rep execution. Existing text-to-CAD methods have made promising progress in generating CAD programs from natural-language descriptions, but they still struggle when user prompts are ambiguous, underspecified, or only describe high-level design intent. They also rarely exploit expert procedural knowledge naturally available in industrial workflows, such as CATIA operation recordings, macro logs, drawing notes, and engineering descriptions. We present ArtisanCAD, a skill-guided industrial CAD agent with expert-grounded knowledge distillation. The core of ArtisanCAD is CAD intermediate representation (CAD-IR), an executable procedural representation that encodes parameters, ordered operations, MCP tool bindings, dependencies, generated entities, and verification rules. CAD-IR plays two key roles: it first serves as the carrier for distilling expert CAD procedures into reusable parameterized skills; then it provides a procedural scaffold that turns vague or intermediate-level prompts into complete executable CAD operations. ArtisanCAD retrieves expert-derived skills, instantiates and revises CAD-IR, executes the resulting procedure through a dedicated CATIA-MCP backend, and uses multi-view visual feedback for iterative refinement, and finally generates production-ready B-Rep models. On the Text2CAD benchmark, CAD-IR improves generation from intermediate prompts by reducing mean Chamfer Distance from $14.83$ to $9.88$, showing its ability to bridge ambiguous textual intent and executable CAD construction. On four complex automotive components, CAD-IR enables expert CATIA recordings to be distilled into reusable skills, allowing ArtisanCAD to generate editable CATIA-native B-Rep models for new variant requests.
Advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked interest in automating parametric CAD modeling through natural language. Existing LLM-based approaches often treat CAD modeling as flat text generation, overlooking the hierarchical structure and geometric constraints inherent in CAD programs. We present CAD-Factory, a Text-to-CAD generation system for language-driven CAD modeling that explicitly models the structural and parametric semantics of CAD programs. Our core contribution is a new formulation of CAD generation as structured program synthesis, coupled with a learnable hierarchical CAD program representation that disentangles structural topology from parameter instantiation. Building on this formulation, CAD-Factory adopts a manager–programmer–reviewer architecture: a planning agent infers program hierarchy, a coding agent instantiates symbolic and numerical parameters, and an evaluation module enforces structural validity and geometric feasibility, which supports structure-aware reasoning, constraint-consistent generation, and interpretable program synthesis. An editor–viewer loop further enables part-aware code refinement through visual feedback, supporting iterative and controllable design workflows. We also contribute a process-oriented annotation pipeline and a Text–CAD dataset with parameter-free or partially specified descriptions that reflect real-world design expression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAD-Factory significantly improves structural correctness and geometric consistency across diverse CAD code generation and editing tasks, establishing a structured, interpretable, and robust framework for AI-assisted design.
Yang Liu, Daxuan Ren, Yijie Ding et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
CADIR, an agent-friendly executable intermediate representation for CAD generation and cross-backend editing, and a construction-graph retrieval method for text and image queries that supports both full-graph and subgraph retrieval, enabling agents to leverage complete models and modeling substructures.
Yu Liu, Jingzhe Ni, Yiming Chen et al.· 0 citations
Automating industrial CAD design and manufacturing places distinctive demands on multimodal foundation models: the model must see engineering drawings and 3D geometry screenshots, write correct parametric-modelling scripts and Windows COM API code, and cover the full range from single parts to assemblies. General-purpose multimodal models fall short on these tasks, while single-task fine-tuning is too narrow to support the diverse calls that upper-layer agents issue. We build IndustryForge-27B on top of Qwen3.5-VL-27B by curating and integrating six industrial-CAD sub-corpora totalling $\sim$52k multimodal samples---CAD Visual QA (CAD-VQA), parametric CAD code (text2cadquery), assembly-level CAD code (text2cadquery-assembly), and three COM sub-corpora for Inventor / SolidWorks (com_2d / com_3d / com_assembly)---and training with a unified multi-task SFT recipe. Across four CAD-domain benchmarks IndustryForge-27B lifts the base model by $+33.65$~pp on average and outperforms the strong closed-source model GPT-5.4 on all four; across eleven general-capability benchmarks it retains, and slightly improves upon, the base model ($+1.56$~pp mean, no catastrophic forgetting). IndustryForge-27B will serve as the common substrate for downstream industrial-agent projects, providing a unified starting point for a full-stack industrial agent that spans from CAD design to industrial-software operation, from parts to assemblies, and from single-shot generation to closed-loop self-improvement.
Nianchen Deng, Jiaxin Ai, Tao Hu et al.· 0 citations
Procedural material creation underpins applications in digital content creation, visual effects, and 3D asset design. Achieving high-quality results requires more than reproducing node graphs -- it demands understanding the process by which experts construct materials. We formulate procedural material generation as retrieval-time process reasoning over expert demonstrations, elevating process to a first-class representation beyond graph-only synthesis. Concretely, we represent expert workflows as process traces: textual records of construction steps, parameters, and design intent. To instantiate this idea, we use a pretrained LLM-based ProcessSynthesizer to synthesize a process trace aligned with a user's intent and a pretrained LLM-based Compiler to ground the process trace into an executable Blender material graph. Because procedural expertise is most naturally conveyed through demonstrations, we leverage tutorial videos as a source of process knowledge and extract textual, LLM-compatible traces using automated video analysis tools. In an expert study with five Blender artists (avg. 7.5 years of experience), materials generated by reflecting expert demonstrations were found to produce workflows requiring fewer edits, and more closely match professional design strategies than methods operating solely on static artifacts. A user study with 150 participants further shows that our approach achieves superior generation and editing performance compared to prior procedural systems. All code, models, and data will be available at https://materialapprentice.github.io
Kunal Gupta, Gaurav Joshi, Ye Chen et al.· 0 citations
A CAD model is not engineering-grade merely because it looks correct. It must satisfy design requirements, respond predictably to parameter changes, support controlled edits, match a reference structural response under a declared analysis, and connect to other parts through valid joints. We present CADEngBench, a two-track benchmark for these capabilities. CADEngBench-P evaluates 300 parametric parts, each used for one zero-to-CAD task and one functional-editing task (600 tasks in total), through boundary-representation (B-Rep) validity, engineering and DFM checks, parameter-family perturbations, functional editing, and matched linear-static FEA in CalculiX. CADEngBench-A evaluates 150 body pairs through ranked joint retrieval, exact face-and-edge grounding, joint-frame prediction, and kinematic verification. Across eight multimodal, code-capable models, editing supplied CAD is substantially easier than generating it, while complex edits and matched FEA remain difficult. Assembly predictions often locate the relevant region but fail to recover the recorded joint or mating entities. These results show that CAD evaluation must test engineering behavior rather than appearance alone.
AssemCAD is presented, an axiom-grounded framework for production-ready CAD assembly generation from natural language that extends Text-to-CAD from isolated part generation toward production-ready mechanical assembly design.