# Clarify Before You Draw: Proactive Agents for Robust Text-to-CAD Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03045 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03045/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 39 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [Length-Controlled AlpacaEval: A Simple Way to Debias Automatic Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04475/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for Problem-Solving with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00724/) (2024)
- [DeepCAD: A Deep Generative Network for Computer-Aided Design Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09492/) (2021)
- [Judging the Judges: A Systematic Study of Position Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07791/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04856/) (2023)
- [SkexGen: Autoregressive Generation of CAD Construction Sequences with Disentangled Codebooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04632/) (2022)
- [Verbosity Bias in Preference Labeling by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10076/) (2023)
- [Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12361/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Neural Coding for Controllable CAD Model Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00149/) (2023)
- [CAD-MLLM: Unifying Multimodality-Conditioned CAD Generation With MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04954/) (2024)
- [CAD-Llama: Leveraging Large Language Models for Computer-Aided Design Parametric 3D Model Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04481/) (2025)
- [CAD-Recode: Reverse Engineering CAD Code from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14042/) (2024)
- [CAD-SIGNet: CAD Language Inference from Point Clouds using Layer-wise Sketch Instance Guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17678/) (2024)
- [Generating CAD Code with Vision-Language Models for 3D Designs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05340/) (2024)
- [CAD-Coder: Text-to-CAD Generation with Chain-of-Thought and Geometric Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19713/) (2025)
- [Text-to-CAD Generation Through Infusing Visual Feedback in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19054/) (2025)
- [Training Proactive and Personalized LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02208/) (2025)
- [Text-to-CadQuery: A New Paradigm for CAD Generation with Scalable Large Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06507/) (2025)
- [LLM-Powered User Simulator for Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16984/) (2024)
- [FlexCAD: Unified and Versatile Controllable CAD Generation with Fine-tuned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05823/) (2024)
- [Asking the Right Question at the Right Time: Human and Model Uncertainty Guidance to Ask Clarification Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06509/) (2024)
- [Query2CAD: Generating CAD models using natural language queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00144/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13368/) (2026)
- [P3D-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Parametric 3D Generation and Structural Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11152/) (2026)
- [CADIR: A Cross-Backend Editable Intermediate Representation for Agentic CAD Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00891/) (2026)
- [WorldBagel: Uncovering the Power of Unified Multimodal Models for Vision-Language-Action-World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03461/) (2026)
- [Wrong Design Intent Is Worse Than Never Conditioning: A Derangement-Control Diagnosis of Header Conditioning in CAD Program Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23191/) (2026)
- [RA-CAD: Learning Post-Execution Critique for State-Aware Text-to-CAD Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05714/) (2026)
- [ExpConCAD: Experience-Guided Text-to-CAD Generation from Shape Descriptions with Implicit Spatial Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24760/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models have recently enabled text-to-CAD systems that synthesize parametric CAD programs (e.g., CadQuery) from natural-language prompts. In practice, however, geometric descriptions can be under-specified or internally inconsistent: critical dimensions may be missing and constraints may conflict. However, existing fine-tuned models tend to reactively follow the user instructions and hallucinate dimensions when the text is ambiguous. To address this, we propose a proactive agentic framework for text-to-CadQuery generation, named as ProCAD, that resolves specification issues before code synthesis. Our framework pairs a proactive clarifying agent, which audits the prompt and asks targeted clarification questions only when necessary to produce a self-consistent specification, with a CAD coding agent that translates the specification into an executable CadQuery program. We fine-tune the coding agent based on a curated high-quality text-to-CadQuery dataset and train the clarifying agent via agentic SFT on clarification trajectories. Experiments show that proactive clarification significantly improves robustness to ambiguous prompts while keeping interaction overhead low. ProCAD outperforms frontier closed-source models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, reducing the mean Chamfer distance by 79.9% and lowering the invalidity ratio from 4.8% to 0.9%. Our code and datasets are made publicly available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/Pro-CAD.