# Pygmalion Effect in Vision: Image-to-Clay Translation for Reflective Geometry Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21098/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15098/) (2024)
- [NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05231/) (2022)
- [Neural RGB-D Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04532/) (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)
- [NeRO: Neural Geometry and BRDF Reconstruction of Reflective Objects from Multiview Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17398/) (2023)
- [Relightable 3D Gaussians: Realistic Point Cloud Relighting with BRDF Decomposition and Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16043/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Ray Tracing: Fast Tracing of Particle Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07090/) (2024)
- [NSML: Meet the MLaaS platform with a real-world case study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09957/) (2018)
- [Reflective Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19282/) (2024)
- [NeRF-Casting: Improved View-Dependent Appearance with Consistent Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14871/) (2024)
- [Ref-GS: Directional Factorization for 2D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00905/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding reflection remains a long-standing challenge in 3D reconstruction due to the entanglement of appearance and geometry under view-dependent reflections. In this work, we present the Pygmalion Effect in Vision, a novel framework that metaphorically "sculpts" reflective objects into clay-like forms through image-to-clay translation. Inspired by the myth of Pygmalion, our method learns to suppress specular cues while preserving intrinsic geometric consistency, enabling robust reconstruction from multi-view images containing complex reflections. Specifically, we introduce a dual-branch network in which a BRDF-based reflective branch is complemented by a clay-guided branch that stabilizes geometry and refines surface normals. The two branches are trained jointly using the synthesized clay-like images, which provide a neutral, reflection-free supervision signal that complements the reflective views. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate substantial improvement in normal accuracy and mesh completeness over existing reflection-handling methods. Beyond technical gains, our framework reveals that seeing by unshining, translating radiance into neutrality, can serve as a powerful inductive bias for reflective object geometry learning.