CAD-Recode: Reverse Engineering CAD Code from Point Clouds
Authors: name: Danila Rukhovich, name: Elona Dupont, name: Dimitrios Mallis, name: Kseniya Cherenkova, name: Anis Kacem, name: Djamila Aouada

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models are typically constructed by sequentially
drawing parametric sketches and applying CAD operations to obtain a 3D model.
The problem of 3D CAD reverse engineering consists of reconstructing the sketch
and CAD operation sequences from 3D representations such as point clouds. In
this paper, we address this challenge through novel contributions across three
levels: CAD sequence representation, network design, and dataset. In
particular, we represent CAD sketch-extrude sequences as Python code. The
proposed CAD-Recode translates a point cloud into Python code that, when
executed, reconstructs the CAD model. Taking advantage of the exposure of
pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to Python code, we leverage a
relatively small LLM as a decoder for CAD-Recode and combine it with a
lightweight point cloud projector. CAD-Recode is trained solely on a proposed
synthetic dataset of one million diverse CAD sequences. CAD-Recode
significantly outperforms existing methods across three datasets while
requiring fewer input points. Notably, it achieves 10 times lower mean Chamfer
distance than state-of-the-art methods on DeepCAD and Fusion360 datasets.
Furthermore, we show that our CAD Python code output is interpretable by
off-the-shelf LLMs, enabling CAD editing and CAD-specific question answering
from point clouds.