# Differentiable Inverse Rendering with Interpretable Basis BRDFs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.17994 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17994/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [NeRD: Neural Reflectance Decomposition from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03918/) (2020)
- [PhySG: Inverse Rendering with Spherical Gaussians for Physics-based Material Editing and Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00674/) (2021)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16473/) (2023)
- [Neural-PIL: Neural Pre-Integrated Lighting for Reflectance Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14373/) (2021)
- [Inverse Rendering for Complex Indoor Scenes: Shape, Spatially-Varying Lighting and SVBRDF from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02722/) (2019)
- [Modeling Indirect Illumination for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06837/) (2022)
- [TensoIR: Tensorial Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12461/) (2023)
- [NeRO: Neural Geometry and BRDF Reconstruction of Reflective Objects from Multiview Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17398/) (2023)
- [High-quality Surface Reconstruction using Gaussian Surfels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17774/) (2024)
- [IRON: Inverse Rendering by Optimizing Neural SDFs and Materials from Photometric Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02232/) (2022)
- [NeILF: Neural Incident Light Field for Physically-based Material Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07182/) (2022)
- [Neural Inverse Rendering of an Indoor Scene from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02453/) (2019)
- [InverseRenderNet: Learning single image inverse rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12328/) (2018)
- [SAMURAI: Shape And Material from Unconstrained Real-world Arbitrary Image collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15768/) (2022)
- [GIR: 3D Gaussian Inverse Rendering for Relightable Scene Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05133/) (2023)
- [Differentiable Point-Based Radiance Fields for Efficient View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14330/) (2022)
- [PS-NeRF: Neural Inverse Rendering for Multi-view Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11406/) (2022)
- [IntrinsicAnything: Learning Diffusion Priors for Inverse Rendering Under Unknown Illumination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11593/) (2024)
- [IRISformer: Dense Vision Transformers for Single-Image Inverse Rendering in Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08423/) (2022)
- [GS^3: Efficient Relighting with Triple Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11419/) (2024)
- [Relighting Neural Radiance Fields with Shadow and Highlight Hints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13404/) (2023)
- [NeFII: Inverse Rendering for Reflectance Decomposition with Near-Field Indirect Illumination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16617/) (2023)
- [A Diffusion Approach to Radiance Field Relighting using Multi-Illumination Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08947/) (2024)
- [MaterialFusion: Enhancing Inverse Rendering with Material Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15273/) (2024)
- [WildLight: In-the-wild Inverse Rendering with a Flashlight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14190/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Real-world Display Inverse Rendering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14411/) (2025)
- [Neural Multi-View Self-Calibrated Photometric Stereo without Photometric Stereo Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23162/) (2025)
- [GLOW: Global Illumination-Aware Inverse Rendering of Indoor Scenes Captured with Dynamic Co-Located Light & Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22857/) (2025)
- [Snapshot Polarimetric Display Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24915/) (2026)
- [TRON: Tracing Rays to Orchestrate a Neural Renderer for 3D Gaussian Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11314/) (2026)
- [Diffusion-Based Material Regularization for Physics-Based Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31065/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inverse rendering seeks to reconstruct both geometry and spatially varying BRDFs (SVBRDFs) from captured images. To address the inherent ill-posedness of inverse rendering, basis BRDF representations are commonly used, modeling SVBRDFs as spatially varying blends of a set of basis BRDFs. However, existing methods often yield basis BRDFs that lack intuitive separation and have limited scalability to scenes of varying complexity. In this paper, we introduce a differentiable inverse rendering method that produces interpretable basis BRDFs. Our approach models a scene using 2D Gaussians, where the reflectance of each Gaussian is defined by a weighted blend of basis BRDFs. We efficiently render an image from the 2D Gaussians and basis BRDFs using differentiable rasterization and impose a rendering loss with the input images. During this analysis-by-synthesis optimization process of differentiable inverse rendering, we dynamically adjust the number of basis BRDFs to fit the target scene while encouraging sparsity in the basis weights. This ensures that the reflectance of each Gaussian is represented by only a few basis BRDFs. This approach enables the reconstruction of accurate geometry and interpretable basis BRDFs that are spatially separated. Consequently, the resulting scene representation, comprising basis BRDFs and 2D Gaussians, supports physically-based novel-view relighting and intuitive scene editing.