Error Notebook-Guided, Training-Free Part Retrieval in 3D CAD Assemblies via Vision-Language Models

Effective specification-aware part retrieval within complex CAD assemblies is essential for automated engineering tasks. However, using LLMs/VLMs for this task is challenging: the CAD model metadata sequences often exceed token budgets, and fine-tuning high-performing proprietary models (e.g., GPT or Gemini) is unavailable. Therefore, we need a framework that delivers engineering value by handling long, non-natural-language CAD model metadata using VLMs, but without training. We propose a 2-stage framework with inference-time adaptation that combines corrected Error Notebooks with RAG to substantially improve VLM-based part retrieval reasoning. Each Error Notebook is built by correcting initial CoTs through reflective refinement, and then filtering each trajectory using our proposed grammar-constraint (GC) verifier to ensure structural well-formedness. The resulting notebook forms a high-quality repository of specification-CoT-answer triplets, from which RAG retrieves specification-relevant exemplars to condition the model's inference. We additionally contribute a CAD dataset with human preference annotations. Experiments with proprietary models (GPT-4o, Gemini, etc) show large gains, with GPT-4o (Omni) achieving up to +23.4 absolute accuracy points on the human-preference benchmark. The proposed GC verifier can further produce up to +4.5 accuracy points. Our approach also surpasses other training-free baselines (standard few-shot learning, self-consistency) and yields substantial improvements also for open-source VLMs (Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct, Aya-Vision-8B). Under the cross-model GC setting, where the Error Notebook is constructed using GPT-4o (Omni), the 2B model inference achieves performance that comes within roughly 4 points of GPT-4o mini.