# MatSwap: Light-aware material transfers in images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07784 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07784/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [Blended Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02779/) (2022)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00986/) (2023)
- [Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18124/) (2024)
- [Learning to Predict Indoor Illumination from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00090/) (2017)
- [RGBleftrightarrowX: Image decomposition and synthesis using material- and lighting-aware diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00666/) (2024)
- [Deep Parametric Indoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08812/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Normalizing Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07579/) (2021)

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

- [Overpainting: Localized Context-aware Diffusion Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10811/) (2026)
- [CoatFusion: Controllable Material Coating in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02143/) (2025)
- [FROMAT: Multiview Material Appearance Transfer via Few-Shot Self-Attention Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09617/) (2025)
- [EditSSC: Toward Editable Semantic Occupancy Scenes with Unconditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09273/) (2026)
- [Controllable Texture Tiling with Transformed RoPE-Enhanced Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22945/) (2026)
- [MatReplace: A Reference-Free, Conditioning-Aligned Benchmark for Material Replacement in Interior Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24107/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present MatSwap, a method to transfer materials to designated surfaces in an image photorealistically. Such a task is non-trivial due to the large entanglement of material appearance, geometry, and lighting in a photograph. In the literature, material editing methods typically rely on either cumbersome text engineering or extensive manual annotations requiring artist knowledge and 3D scene properties that are impractical to obtain. In contrast, we propose to directly learn the relationship between the input material -- as observed on a flat surface -- and its appearance within the scene, without the need for explicit UV mapping. To achieve this, we rely on a custom light- and geometry-aware diffusion model. We fine-tune a large-scale pre-trained text-to-image model for material transfer using our synthetic dataset, preserving its strong priors to ensure effective generalization to real images. As a result, our method seamlessly integrates a desired material into the target location in the photograph while retaining the identity of the scene. We evaluate our method on synthetic and real images and show that it compares favorably to recent work both qualitatively and quantitatively. We release our code and data on https://github.com/astra-vision/MatSwap