{"paper":{"title":"VENI: Variational Encoder for Natural Illumination","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Andreea Ardelean, Bernhard Egger, James A. D. Gardner, Paul Walker, William A. P. Smith","submitted_at":"2026-01-20T15:38:02Z","abstract_excerpt":"Inverse rendering is an ill-posed problem, but priors such as illumination priors can help simplify it. Existing work either disregards the spherical and rotation-equivariant nature of illumination environments or does not provide a well-behaved latent space. We propose a rotation-equivariant variational autoencoder that models natural illumination on the sphere without relying on 2D projections. To preserve the SO(2)-equivariance of environment maps, we use a novel Vector Neuron Vision Transformer (VN-ViT) as encoder and a rotation-equivariant conditional neural field as decoder. In the encod"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2601.14079","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2601.14079/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}