PhysReflect: Geometry and Perception Guided Diffusion for Physically-Plausible Mirror Reflections
On the map: Diffusion models → 3D, point cloud and scene generation
Abstract (arXiv)
Diffusion models generate high-quality images, yet often violate the physical laws governing mirror reflections. Reflections often suffer from geometric aberrations, including positional offsets, directional misalignment, proportional imbalance, and structural distortion. These failures remain evident even in contemporary state-of-the-art generative systems. Existing methods itigate this problem through synthetic data scaling or auxiliary depth conditioning, yet their merely reliance on latent-space noise reconstruction losses as implicit supervision prevents direct enforcement of reflection-specific geometric and perceptual constraints. To bridge this gap, we present PhysReflect, a geometry and perception guided diffusion framework that decodes the predicted clean latent into pixel space at each training step and applies annealed supervision through two complementary differentiable objectives. The Geometric Loss enforces mirror-induced spatial consistency through sparse epipolar correspondence and dense boundary projection alignment, where a SAM2-based TwinTrack mechanism provides stable in-mirror localization for boundary-aware supervision. The Perceptual Loss preserves reflected appearance by combining Semantic Consistency Loss, which maintains reflected identity and appearance via DINOv2 features, and Lighting Consistency Loss, which regularizes depth, surface-normal, and illumination coherence under monocular geometry priors. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that PhysReflect outperforms prior mirror-reflection methods in geometric, perceptual, and physical-plausibility metrics, as well as qualitative visual results.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 23 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2026.
Builds on
23 of 38 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2026PI-Light: Physics-Inspired Diffusion for Full-Image Relighting29 Jan
- 2025UniLumos: Fast and Unified Image and Video Relighting with Physics-Plausible Feedback3 Nov
- 2025MirrorVerse: Pushing Diffusion Models to Realistically Reflect the World21 Apr
- 2024Reflecting Reality: Enabling Diffusion Models to Produce Faithful Mirror Reflections23 Sep
- 2024ObjectDrop: Bootstrapping Counterfactuals for Photorealistic Object Removal and Insertion27 Mar
- 2024BrushNet: A Plug-and-Play Image Inpainting Model with Decomposed Dual-Branch Diffusion11 Mar
- 2023EpiDiff: Enhancing Multi-View Synthesis via Localized Epipolar-Constrained Diffusion11 Dec
- 2023Enhancing Diffusion Models with 3D Perspective Geometry Constraints1 Dec
- 2023Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object20 Mar
Other references · 14
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
- 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,974
- 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,356
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
- 2023Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewardscited by 448
- 2023Aligning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Reward Backpropagationcited by 288
- 2024Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Predictioncited by 166
- 2023FreeControl: Training-Free Spatial Control of Any Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Any Conditioncited by 91
- 2023Shadows Don't Lie and Lines Can't Bend! Generative Models don't know Projective Geometry...for nowcited by 61
- 2024Balancing Act: Distribution-Guided Debiasing in Diffusion Modelscited by 52
- 2024MirrorGaussian: Reflecting 3D Gaussians for Reconstructing Mirror Reflectionscited by 21
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- 2026PhysMirror: Physics-Aware Mirror Object Generation
- 2026MirrorWorld: Taming Video Diffusion Models for Mirror Reflection Generation
- 2026Reflection-aware Generative Novel View Synthesis
- 2026Reflection Separation from a Single Image via Joint Latent Diffusion
- 2026Reflection Generation for Composite Image Using Diffusion Model
- 2026FUMO: Prior-Modulated Diffusion for Single Image Reflection Removal
- 2024Multistable Shape from Shading Emerges from Patch Diffusion
- 2026From Synthesis to Removal: Physics-Grounded Reflection Simulation and Diffusion-Based Video Dereflection