Intent2CAD: How Semantic-Parametric Supervision Shapes Text-to-CAD Generation

Text-to-CAD generation aims to make CAD modeling more accessible by generating executable CAD programs from natural-language descriptions. However, practical CAD workflows require more than executable geometry: generated programs should also expose reusable structure that supports later modification. We introduce intent-oriented text-to-CAD generation, where design intent is expressed as recoverable code-level signals: semantic features, reusable parameters, and lightweight parametric relations. Rather than changing the model architecture or decoding procedure, we investigate how supervision representation granularity affects both CAD generation and zero-shot intent-preserving editing. To enable this study, we construct IntentCAD-100K, a 100K paired text--code dataset built by converting low-level CAD construction traces into executable CadQuery programs. We further construct IntentCAD-Edit-1K to evaluate zero-shot intent-preserving editing from the same representation perspective. Intent2CAD uses a two-stage conservative lifting pipeline: semantic lifting rewrites reliable primitive groups into feature-level operations, while parametric lifting exposes lightweight parametric relations. Under controlled fine-tuning, semantic lifting mainly improves generation reliability and feature recovery, reducing IR from 2.39% to 0.22% and achieving 99.96% API Recovery, while parametric lifting makes reusable relation structure explicit and further improves relation-aware zero-shot editing. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/JinboYang94/Intent2CAD.