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REVIEW 1 major objections 2 minor 5 references

F-RNG: Feed-Forward Relightable Neural Gaussians

T0 review · 1 major / 2 minor · reviewed 2026-06-29 · grok-4.3

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Pith's one-line read F-RNG produces relightable 3D Gaussian assets directly from sparse views by distilling intrinsic decomposition priors into an unmodified large reconstruction model.

desk verdict F-RNG adds relightable output to existing LRMs via IDM priors and small trainable modules without retraining the base models, which is the practical hook if the speed and quality numbers hold up. read the letter →

arxiv 2605.25975 v2 pith:MYFZSLTI submitted 2026-05-25 cs.GR cs.CV

Guangming Fu , Jiahui Fan , Jian Yang , Miloš Hašan , Beibei Wang This is my paper · ORCID
classification cs.GRcs.CV
keywords feed-forwardreconstructionrelightable3DGaussianssparse-viewinputsintrinsicdecompositionpriorsneuralrenderinglargemodelsappearancedistillationGaussiansplatting
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

The paper establishes a feed-forward pipeline that turns sparse input images into relightable 3D Gaussian splatting representations without per-scene optimization or retraining of the base model. It does this by adding geometry synthesis inside the latent space of an existing large reconstruction model and then distilling appearance priors from a separate intrinsic decomposition model so that the output Gaussians separate lighting from material. A sympathetic reader would care because prior approaches either demand dozens of input views and heavy per-scene fitting or produce assets whose illumination is baked in and cannot be changed afterward; the new method promises both generalization across scenes and fast relighting at inference time.

What carries the argument

Prior-guided relightable appearance distillation, which transfers lighting-separated priors from an intrinsic decomposition model into the unmodified large reconstruction model to produce relightable neural Gaussian representations.

What would settle it

A controlled ablation that removes the intrinsic decomposition priors and measures whether relighting PSNR on held-out scenes falls below the reported 2 dB gain over the baseline LRM method.

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Extended reading notes

Core claim

F-RNG is a feed-forward framework that directly generates relightable 3DGS assets from sparse-view inputs. It augments an existing large reconstruction model with latent-interpolated fine-grained geometry synthesis, performs prior-guided relightable appearance distillation that incorporates priors from an intrinsic decomposition model, and applies a universal neural renderer for flexible high-fidelity relighting. The framework requires neither re-training nor fine-tuning of the underlying large reconstruction model and therefore can automatically benefit from future improvements in those models.

Load-bearing premise

Priors extracted from an intrinsic decomposition model can be distilled into an unmodified large reconstruction model to yield accurate relightable representations from sparse inputs.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

  • Relighting inference runs approximately 25 times faster than the prior state-of-the-art LRM-based relighting approach.
  • Rendered quality improves by roughly 2 dB compared with the same baseline.
  • The method works with only small additional networks trained on modest data and compute, avoiding repeated large-model inference under varying lights.
  • No modification or retraining of the base large reconstruction model is required, so any future advance in those models is inherited automatically.
  • The approach supports flexible relighting through a universal neural renderer without changing the underlying Gaussian representation.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same distillation pattern could be tested on other feed-forward 3D reconstruction backbones beyond the specific LRM used here.
  • If the intrinsic priors prove stable across lighting domains, the method might extend to outdoor or dynamic scenes where current per-scene methods struggle.
  • Real-time applications such as AR preview could become feasible once the small distillation networks are quantized or distilled further.
  • The separation of geometry synthesis and appearance distillation steps may allow independent upgrades of either component without touching the other.
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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

1 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript presents F-RNG, a feed-forward framework for generating relightable 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) assets directly from sparse-view inputs. It builds on an unmodified existing large reconstruction model (LRM) by incorporating priors from an intrinsic decomposition model (IDM) via three components: latent-interpolated fine-grained geometry synthesis, prior-guided relightable appearance distillation, and a universal neural renderer. The approach requires no re-training or fine-tuning of the LRM and claims to deliver ~25x faster relighting together with ~+2.0 dB quality improvement relative to the current state-of-the-art LRM-based relighting baseline.

Significance. If the reported speed and quality gains are substantiated, the work would be a meaningful contribution to feed-forward 3D reconstruction and relighting. The modular construction that leaves the underlying LRM untouched is a clear strength, as it permits automatic uptake of future improvements in both LRMs and IDMs. The reliance on small, affordably trained networks rather than repeated large-model inference under varying illumination is also practically valuable for scene generalization from sparse inputs.

major comments (1)
  1. [Experiments] Experiments section: the headline claims of ~25x speedup and +2.0 dB PSNR improvement are presented without accompanying tables that list per-scene timings, exact baseline implementations, dataset statistics, or error bars; these omissions make it impossible to verify that the gains are load-bearing for the central feed-forward claim.
minor comments (2)
  1. [§3.1] §3.1: the description of latent interpolation would benefit from an explicit equation or pseudocode block showing how the interpolated latent codes are formed from the LRM encoder outputs.
  2. [Figure 4] Figure 4 caption: the lighting conditions used for the qualitative comparisons are not stated, hindering direct visual assessment of relighting fidelity.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

1 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive feedback and for recognizing the modular design and practical advantages of F-RNG. We address the single major comment below and will revise the manuscript to incorporate the requested details.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Experiments] Experiments section: the headline claims of ~25x speedup and +2.0 dB PSNR improvement are presented without accompanying tables that list per-scene timings, exact baseline implementations, dataset statistics, or error bars; these omissions make it impossible to verify that the gains are load-bearing for the central feed-forward claim.

    Authors: We agree that the current presentation of the headline claims would benefit from additional supporting tables. In the revised manuscript we will add a dedicated table (and corresponding supplementary material) that reports per-scene timings, per-scene PSNR values with standard deviations, exact baseline implementations (including model versions and inference settings), and dataset statistics (number of scenes, view counts, lighting conditions). These additions will allow direct verification of the reported ~25x speedup and +2.0 dB average improvement. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 0.0 of 10

No significant circularity identified

full rationale

The paper presents a modular feed-forward architecture that composes an unmodified LRM with IDM priors and small trainable networks for geometry and appearance. No equations, derivations, or first-principles predictions appear in the abstract or described method. Performance claims (~25x speed, +2 dB) are stated as empirical outcomes of this construction rather than results derived from fitted parameters or self-referential definitions. No self-citation chains, ansatzes smuggled via citation, or renamings of known results are load-bearing for the central claims. The derivation chain is therefore self-contained against external benchmarks.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 0 assumptions · 0 invented entities

Abstract provides no equations, parameters, or explicit assumptions; ledger entries cannot be extracted.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of F-RNG: Feed-Forward Relightable Neural Gaussians." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/MYFZSLTI

@misc{pith2026260525975,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: F-RNG: Feed-Forward Relightable Neural Gaussians},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/MYFZSLTI}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2605.25975}
}
read the original abstract

Capturing relightable 3D assets from real-world objects is a widely researched problem. Several per-scene optimization-based methods, based on 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS), support relighting; however, they usually require dense input views, and their overfitting nature makes it difficult to generalize across scenes. Unlike per-scene optimization methods, generalized feed-forward models can directly reconstruct Gaussians from sparse input views. However, the resulting assets have baked-in illumination and cannot be easily used for relighting. In this paper, we present F-RNG, a feed-forward framework that directly generates relightable 3DGS assets from sparse-view inputs. Training such a model from scratch can require massive data and computing resources, and it is especially challenging to generate relightable assets in a feed-forward manner with acceptable cost. We develop F-RNG upon an existing large reconstruction model (LRM) to extract relightable representations, while also utilizing priors from an intrinsic decomposition model (IDM). Specifically, we first introduce a latent-interpolated fine-grained geometry synthesis to enhance the LRM's geometry representation. Second, we propose a prior-guided relightable appearance distillation to extract relightable neural representations by incorporating IDM priors. Finally, a universal neural renderer enables flexible and high-fidelity relighting. F-RNG requires neither re-training nor fine-tuning of the underlying LRMs, thus can automatically benefit from better LRMs and IDMs in the future. With only small networks that can be trained with affordable data and computational resources, F-RNG avoids the repetitive inference of large models under different light conditions. By comparison to the state-of-the-art LRM-based relighting method, F-RNG achieves ~25x faster relighting, as well as superior quality (~+2.0 dB).

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.25975 by the authors.

Figure 1
Figure 1. We propose F-RNG, a novel feed-forward relighting framework that directly reconstructs relightable neural Gaussian assets from sparse view inputs. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p001_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. The overview of F-RNG. F-RNG leverages priors from an LRM and IDM, and it consists of three main components: (A) a latent-interpolated fine-grained geometry synthesis that produces detailed geometries, (B) a prior-guided relightable appearance distillation, comprising of MaterialFormer and a light-independence regularization, to extract relightable neural representations, and (C) a universal neural renderer that can… view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. The overview of latent-interpolated fine-grained geometry synthesis. By detecting the top-𝐾 salient patches with highly-detailed geometries or textures, F-RNG interpolates RelitLRM’s geometry tokens to sythesize new ones. They are then decoded by another de-tokenizer to represent detailed structures, with the IDM priors as guidance. Second, we select top-𝐾 salient patches and interpolate their tokens to generate fin… view at source ↗
Figures from the paper (14 more)
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: The overview of prior-guided relightable appearance distil￾lation. This module consists of two components: the MaterialFormer and the light-independence regularization. RelitLRM (omitted in the figure) generates geometry and appearance tokens from input views; they are…
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Ablation study. (A) Latent-interpolated fine-grained geometry syn￾thesis overcomes resolution limits on high-frequency details, resulting in sharp textures in salient regions. (B) IDM priors provide guidance for the decomposition; without them, the network exhibits out…
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Comparison of relighting quality with RelitLRM [Zhang et al. 2024b] on synthetic datasets. Our model provides a more reasonable decomposition, resulting in closer alignment with the ground truth across all the test scenes, particularly for complex appearances like fur …
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_7.png]
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Comparison of relighting quality with Neural Gaffer [Jin et al. 2024] and DiLightNet [Zeng et al. 2024b] on synthetic datasets. F-RNG uses six input views to reconstruct the relightable 3D assets, while other methods directly relight the target view with the target lig…
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Comparison of relighting quality with dense-view 3DGS-based relighting methods [Gao et al. 2023; Liang et al. 2024] on synthetic datasets. Our model produces the best quality with only 6 input views, compared to more than 100 input images from other methods. optimizati…
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Comparison of NVS qualities with DNG [Li et al. 2024] on synthetic datasets. With both 6 input views, our approach achieves superior results across diverse scenes than DNG [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p015_10.png]
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Relighting highly-reflective objects. Our method tends to produce blurry results when rendering highly-reflective materials. 0.9 1.0 w/o light-independence regularization w/ light-independence regularization Env. 1 Env. 7 Env. 7 Env. 4 Env. 4 Env. 1 Env. 4 Env. 7 Env.…
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: The effect of light-independence regularization. With the light-independence regularization, the MaterialFormer can predict a more compact and plausible latent distribution for the same material. Note that larger values indicate higher similarity. , Vol. 1, No. 1, Art…
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: Comparison of the relighting quality with RelitLRM on synthetic datasets. Our model provides more reasonable decomposition results, especially for complex appearances (e.g., fur). , Vol. 1, No. 1, Article . Publication date: May 2026 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig…
Figure 14
Figure 14. Figure 14: Relighting results of F-RNG under various environment maps. Our model can plausibly decompose the light and material, leading to high-quality relighting results under varying environment lights. , Vol. 1, No. 1, Article . Publication date: May 2026 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:f…
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15: Comparison with image-based relighting methods (DiffusionRenderer [Liang et al. 2025], LightSwitch [Litman et al. 2025a]) on real￾world datasets. Our method produces overall closer results to the ground truth. , Vol. 1, No. 1, Article . Publication date: May 2026 [PI…
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16: Robustness of our decomposition against different input light conditions. We validate our relighting results of the same objects with different initial light conditions, and both predicts close results to the ground truth, demonstrating the plausible decomposition in …
Figure 17
Figure 17. Figure 17: Impact of the number of Input views. Although F-RNG supports varying number of input views, to balance the quality and cost, we choose to use 6 input views for all experiments in our paper. , Vol. 1, No. 1, Article . Publication date: May 2026 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figure…

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Reference graph

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Reviewed June 29, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.