# StepCAD: Mesh-to-CAD Code Generation via LLM Policy and Geometry-Guided Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03799/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05128/) (2023)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12202/) (2025)
- [ABC: A Big CAD Model Dataset For Geometric Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06216/) (2018)
- [DeepCAD: A Deep Generative Network for Computer-Aided Design Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09492/) (2021)
- [LEVER: Learning to Verify Language-to-Code Generation with Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08468/) (2023)
- [Planning with Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05510/) (2023)
- [DeepCoder: Learning to Write Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01989/) (2016)
- [SkexGen: Autoregressive Generation of CAD Construction Sequences with Disentangled Codebooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04632/) (2022)
- [BrepGen: A B-rep Generative Diffusion Model with Structured Latent Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15563/) (2024)
- [Write, Execute, Assess: Program Synthesis with a REPL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04604/) (2019)
- [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-Recode: Reverse Engineering CAD Code from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14042/) (2024)
- [Point2Cyl: Reverse Engineering 3D Objects from Point Clouds to Extrusion Cylinders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09329/) (2021)
- [Text-to-CAD Generation Through Infusing Visual Feedback in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19054/) (2025)
- [CAD-Coder: An Open-Source Vision-Language Model for Computer-Aided Design Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14646/) (2025)
- [Img2CAD: Conditioned 3D CAD Model Generation from Single Image with Structured Visual Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03417/) (2024)
- [Point2CAD: Reverse Engineering CAD Models from 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04962/) (2023)
- [CADCrafter: Generating Computer-Aided Design Models from Unconstrained Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04753/) (2025)
- [CADDreamer: CAD Object Generation from Single-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20732/) (2025)
- [Seek-CAD: A Self-refined Generative Modeling for 3D Parametric CAD Using Local Inference via DeepSeek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17702/) (2025)
- [Utonia: Toward One Encoder for All Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03283/) (2026)
- [Pointer-CAD: Unifying B-Rep and Command Sequences via Pointer-based Edges & Faces Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04337/) (2026)
- [CADBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for AI-Assisted CAD Program Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10873/) (2026)
- [VideoCAD: A Dataset and Model for Learning Long-Horizon 3D CAD UI Interactions from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24838/) (2025)
- [CAD-Coder:Text-Guided CAD Files Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08686/) (2025)
- [GenCAD-3D: CAD Program Generation using Multimodal Latent Space Alignment and Synthetic Dataset Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15246/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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/