Computer-Aided Design as Language
This addresses the problem of reducing effort and training for engineers in manufacturing by enabling intelligent CAD tools, though it appears incremental as it combines existing techniques.
The paper tackles the difficulty of creating structured 2D sketches in CAD by proposing a machine learning model that automatically generates these sketches, performing well for unconditional synthesis and image-to-sketch translation.
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications are used in manufacturing to model everything from coffee mugs to sports cars. These programs are complex and require years of training and experience to master. A component of all CAD models particularly difficult to make are the highly structured 2D sketches that lie at the heart of every 3D construction. In this work, we propose a machine learning model capable of automatically generating such sketches. Through this, we pave the way for developing intelligent tools that would help engineers create better designs with less effort. Our method is a combination of a general-purpose language modeling technique alongside an off-the-shelf data serialization protocol. We show that our approach has enough flexibility to accommodate the complexity of the domain and performs well for both unconditional synthesis and image-to-sketch translation.