# HeadLighter: Disentangling Illumination in Generative 3D Gaussian Heads via Lightstage Captures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02103 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02103/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [pi-GAN: Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00926/) (2020)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (2020)
- [NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05231/) (2022)
- [Disentangled and Controllable Face Image Generation via 3D Imitative-Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11660/) (2020)
- [Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03704/) (2023)
- [Next3D: Generative Neural Texture Rasterization for 3D-Aware Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11208/) (2022)
- [Bilateral Reference for High-Resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03407/) (2024)
- [GAN-Control: Explicitly Controllable GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02477/) (2021)
- [A Shading-Guided Generative Implicit Model for Shape-Accurate 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15678/) (2021)
- [Learning to Relight Portrait Images via a Virtual Light Stage and Synthetic-to-Real Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10510/) (2022)
- [SwitchLight: Co-design of Physics-driven Architecture and Pre-training Framework for Human Portrait Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18848/) (2024)
- [GGHead: Fast and Generalizable 3D Gaussian Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09377/) (2024)
- [Face Relighting with Geometrically Consistent Shadows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16681/) (2022)
- [LumiNet: Latent Intrinsics Meets Diffusion Models for Indoor Scene Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00177/) (2024)
- [VoLux-GAN: A Generative Model for 3D Face Synthesis with HDRI Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04873/) (2022)
- [Holo-Relighting: Controllable Volumetric Portrait Relighting from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09632/) (2024)
- [Lux Post Facto: Learning Portrait Performance Relighting with Conditional Video Diffusion and a Hybrid Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14485/) (2025)
- [Lite2Relight: 3D-aware Single Image Portrait Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10487/) (2024)
- [SynthLight: Portrait Relighting with Diffusion Model by Learning to Re-render Synthetic Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09756/) (2025)
- [3DFaceShop: Explicitly Controllable 3D-Aware Portrait Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05434/) (2022)
- [Real-time 3D-aware Portrait Video Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18355/) (2024)
- [FaceLit: Neural 3D Relightable Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15437/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent 3D-aware head generative models based on 3D Gaussian Splatting achieve real-time, photorealistic and view-consistent head synthesis. However, a fundamental limitation persists: the deep entanglement of illumination and intrinsic appearance prevents controllable relighting. Existing disentanglement methods rely on strong assumptions to enable weakly supervised learning, which restricts their capacity for complex illumination. To address this challenge, we introduce HeadLighter, a novel supervised framework that learns a physically plausible decomposition of appearance and illumination in head generative models. Specifically, we design a dual-branch architecture that separately models lighting-invariant head attributes and physically grounded rendering components. A progressive disentanglement training is employed to gradually inject head appearance priors into the generative architecture, supervised by multi-view images captured under controlled light conditions with a light stage setup. We further introduce a distillation strategy to generate high-quality normals for realistic rendering. Experiments demonstrate that our method preserves high-quality generation and real-time rendering, while simultaneously supporting explicit lighting and viewpoint editing. We will publicly release our code and dataset.