Paper · arXiv 2608.00799
CADENA: Stepwise CAD Reverse Engineering
Soslan Kabisov, Gennadiy Savrasov, Maksim Elistratov, Antonio Rodriguez, Daniil Ignatiev, Nikita Gavrilov, Rustam Uzdenov, Alexey I. Boyko, Igor Pasechnik, Anton Konushin, Andrey Kuznetsov, Dmitrii Zhemchuzhnikov
CADENA reconstructs 3D meshes into parametric CAD programs step-by-step with intermediate geometry checks and introduces a benchmark for mechanical part reverse engineering.
Abstract
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) underpins modern engineering, yet converting existing shapes into editable models still demands substantial expert effort. Most AI systems emit the entire CAD program in a single pass, never inspecting the intermediate geometry. In contrast, human engineers build a part feature by feature, checking after each operation what remains to be modeled. We introduce CADENA (Spanish for "chain"), a model that reconstructs a 3D mesh as a parametric CAD program, growing its sequence of operations one at a time and comparing the target with the currently predicted geometry at every step. We also address the lack of benchmarks for evaluating reverse-engineering methods on mechanical parts, introducing CADENA-Bench, a benchmark that measures performance across categories of mechanical parts. CADENA outperforms prior methods on CADENA-Bench and on the DeepCAD, Fusion 360, and MCB datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/zhemdi/cadena, model weights at https://huggingface.co/kulibinai/cadena, and CADENA-Bench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/kulibinai/cadena-bench.