Anna C. Doris

Cyril Picard, Kristen M. Edwards, Anna C. Doris et al. · mit

Engineering design is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of AI, marking a new era in how we approach product, system, and service planning. Large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in enabling this shift. Yet, with text as their only input modality, they cannot leverage the large body of visual artifacts that engineers have used for centuries and are accustomed to. This gap is addressed with the release of multimodal vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-4V, enabling AI to impact many more types of tasks. Our work presents a comprehensive evaluation of VLMs across a spectrum of engineering design tasks, categorized into four main areas: Conceptual Design, System-Level and Detailed Design, Manufacturing and Inspection, and Engineering Education Tasks. Specifically in this paper, we assess the capabilities of two VLMs, GPT-4V and LLaVA 1.6 34B, in design tasks such as sketch similarity analysis, CAD generation, topology optimization, manufacturability assessment, and engineering textbook problems. Through this structured evaluation, we not only explore VLMs' proficiency in handling complex design challenges but also identify their limitations in complex engineering design applications. Our research establishes a foundation for future assessments of vision language models. It also contributes a set of benchmark testing datasets, with more than 1000 queries, for ongoing advancements and applications in this field.

Anna C. Doris, Jacob Thomas Sony, Ghadi Nehme et al.

Recovering editable CAD programs from images or 3D observations is central to AI-assisted design, but progress is difficult to measure because existing evaluations are fragmented across datasets, modalities, and metrics. We introduce CADBench, a unified benchmark for multimodal CAD program generation. CADBench contains 18,000 evaluation samples spanning six benchmark families derived from DeepCAD, Fusion 360, ABC, MCB, and Objaverse; five input modalities including clean meshes, noisy meshes, single-view renders, photorealistic renders, and multi-view renders; and six metrics covering geometric fidelity, executability, and program compactness. STEP-based families are stratified by B-rep face count and all families are diversity-sampled to support controlled analysis across complexity and object variation. We benchmark eleven CAD-specialized and general-purpose vision-language systems, generating more than 1.4 million CAD programs. Under idealized inputs, specialized mesh-to-CAD models substantially outperform code-generating VLMs, which remain far from reliable CAD program reconstruction. CADBench further reveals three recurring failure modes: reconstruction quality degrades with geometric complexity, CAD-specialized models can be brittle under modality shift, and model rankings change across metrics. Together, these results position CADBench as a diagnostic testbed for measuring progress in editable 3D reconstruction and multimodal CAD understanding. The benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DeCoDELab/CADBench.

Anna C. Doris, Daniele Grandi, Ryan Tomich et al.

This research introduces DesignQA, a novel benchmark aimed at evaluating the proficiency of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in comprehending and applying engineering requirements in technical documentation. Developed with a focus on real-world engineering challenges, DesignQA uniquely combines multimodal data-including textual design requirements, CAD images, and engineering drawings-derived from the Formula SAE student competition. Different from many existing MLLM benchmarks, DesignQA contains document-grounded visual questions where the input image and input document come from different sources. The benchmark features automatic evaluation metrics and is divided into segments-Rule Comprehension, Rule Compliance, and Rule Extraction-based on tasks that engineers perform when designing according to requirements. We evaluate state-of-the-art models (at the time of writing) like GPT-4o, GPT-4, Claude-Opus, Gemini-1.0, and LLaVA-1.5 against the benchmark, and our study uncovers the existing gaps in MLLMs' abilities to interpret complex engineering documentation. The MLLMs tested, while promising, struggle to reliably retrieve relevant rules from the Formula SAE documentation, face challenges in recognizing technical components in CAD images, and encounter difficulty in analyzing engineering drawings. These findings underscore the need for multimodal models that can better handle the multifaceted questions characteristic of design according to technical documentation. This benchmark sets a foundation for future advancements in AI-supported engineering design processes. DesignQA is publicly available at: https://github.com/anniedoris/design_qa/.

Anna C. Doris, Md Ferdous Alam, Amin Heyrani Nobari et al.

Efficient creation of accurate and editable 3D CAD models is critical in engineering design, significantly impacting cost and time-to-market in product innovation. Current manual workflows remain highly time-consuming and demand extensive user expertise. While recent developments in AI-driven CAD generation show promise, existing models are limited by incomplete representations of CAD operations, inability to generalize to real-world images, and low output accuracy. This paper introduces CAD-Coder, an open-source Vision-Language Model (VLM) explicitly fine-tuned to generate editable CAD code (CadQuery Python) directly from visual input. Leveraging a novel dataset that we created--GenCAD-Code, consisting of over 163k CAD-model image and code pairs--CAD-Coder outperforms state-of-the-art VLM baselines such as GPT-4.5 and Qwen2.5-VL-72B, achieving a 100% valid syntax rate and the highest accuracy in 3D solid similarity. Notably, our VLM demonstrates some signs of generalizability, successfully generating CAD code from real-world images and executing CAD operations unseen during fine-tuning. The performance and adaptability of CAD-Coder highlights the potential of VLMs fine-tuned on code to streamline CAD workflows for engineers and designers. CAD-Coder is publicly available at: https://github.com/anniedoris/CAD-Coder.

Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, Hoang Anh Nguyen, Anna C. Doris et al.

Engineering rulebooks and technical standards contain multimodal information like dense text, tables, and illustrations that are challenging for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. Building upon the DesignQA framework [1], which relied on full-text ingestion and text-based retrieval, this work establishes a Multimodal ColPali Enhanced Retrieval and Reasoning Framework (MCERF), a system that couples a multimodal retriever with large language model reasoning for accurate and efficient question answering from engineering documents. The system employs the ColPali, which retrieves both textual and visual information, and multiple retrieval and reasoning strategies: (i) Hybrid Lookup mode for explicit rule mentions, (ii) Vision to Text fusion for figure and table guided queries, (iii) High Reasoning LLM mode for complex multi modal questions, and (iv) SelfConsistency decision to stabilize responses. The modular framework design provides a reusable template for future multimodal systems regardless of underlying model architecture. Furthermore, this work establishes and compares two routing approaches: a single case routing approach and a multi-agent system, both of which dynamically allocate queries to optimal pipelines. Evaluation on the DesignQA benchmark illustrates that this system improves average accuracy across all tasks with a relative gain of +41.1% from baseline RAG best results, which is a significant improvement in multimodal and reasoning-intensive tasks without complete rulebook ingestion. This shows how vision language retrieval, modular reasoning, and adaptive routing enable scalable document comprehension in engineering use cases.