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.
Large language models can write plausible CAD scripts, but reliable industrial CAD modeling requires more than syntactically valid code: every feature, placement, and assembly relation must be accepted by an exact geometric kernel while remaining editable as parametric boundary representation geometry. We present Embodied CAD, solver-grounded LLM agents for parametric B-Rep assembly modeling. Instead of generating a complete script in one pass, the agent iteratively selects actions from a stratified L0-L4 CAD skill library, resolves them into typed geometric operations, executes them in a CAD backend, and uses solver feedback to plan, repair, and learn. The framework combines action grammar constraints, deterministic parameter resolution, and solver-derived rewards for supervised warm-up and GRPO-style refinement. We evaluate Embodied CAD on multi-step mechanical, industrial equipment, and mold-oriented assembly tasks using solver-aligned metrics: executable rate, skill accuracy, operation-family accuracy, exact policy accuracy, and task completion success. The results show that solver-grounded planning executes all strong-planner workflows in the current benchmark, while learned controllers reach high executable rates and expose the remaining gap between valid tool calls and exact long-horizon policy prediction.
Text-to-3D systems can now synthesize a mechanical part from a single sentence, yet the result is a shape to render, not a design to edit. We present Arko-T, a 4B-parameter text-to-design model that maps natural-language intent directly into executable, parametric CAD programs. Rather than optimizing for code executability alone, Arko-T aligns every stage of the pipeline to a formal notion of design state, so that data curation, code normalization, and execution-grounded supervision all work to preserve the features, parameters, and construction logic that make a CAD artifact editable. Benchmarked against seven frontier LLMs across 12 metrics, Arko-T attains the best score on 8 and the second-best on 3 more, at roughly one-tenth the per-benchmark cost. The results suggest that targeted design-level training at moderate scale can match frontier general-purpose models on structured CAD generation.