# Casual Flash Lighting for Gaussian Splat Inverse Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06035 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06035/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Extracting Triangular 3D Models, Materials, and Lighting From Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12503/) (2021)
- [GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16473/) (2023)
- [RGBleftrightarrowX: Image decomposition and synthesis using material- and lighting-aware diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00666/) (2024)
- [Relightable 3D Gaussians: Realistic Point Cloud Relighting with BRDF Decomposition and Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16043/) (2023)
- [IRON: Inverse Rendering by Optimizing Neural SDFs and Materials from Photometric Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02232/) (2022)
- [GS^3: Efficient Relighting with Triple Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11419/) (2024)
- [GI-GS: Global Illumination Decomposition on Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02619/) (2024)
- [Reflective Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19282/) (2024)
- [Direct Intrinsics: Learning Albedo-Shading Decomposition by Convolutional Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02311/) (2015)
- [Ref-GS: Directional Factorization for 2D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00905/) (2024)
- [Multi-view Inverse Rendering for Large-scale Real-world Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10206/) (2022)
- [Factorized Inverse Path Tracing for Efficient and Accurate Material-Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05669/) (2023)
- [SVG-IR: Spatially-Varying Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06815/) (2025)
- [MaterialRefGS: Reflective Gaussian Splatting with Multi-view Consistent Material Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11387/) (2025)
- [IDArb: Intrinsic Decomposition for Arbitrary Number of Input Views and Illuminations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12083/) (2024)
- [WildLight: In-the-wild Inverse Rendering with a Flashlight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14190/) (2023)
- [IRIS: Inverse Rendering of Indoor Scenes from Low Dynamic Range Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12977/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splatting with Discretized SDF for Relightable Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15629/) (2025)
- [GS-ROR2: Bidirectional-guided 3DGS and SDF for Reflective Object Relighting and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18544/) (2024)
- [RTR-GS: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering with Radiance Transfer and Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07733/) (2025)
- [Differentiable Point-based Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02480/) (2023)
- [Sparse Views, Near Light: A Practical Paradigm for Uncalibrated Point-light Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00098/) (2024)
- [MVInverse: Feed-forward Multi-view Inverse Rendering in Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21003/) (2025)
- [SSD-GS: Scattering and Shadow Decomposition for Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13333/) (2026)
- [Phys3DGS: Physically-based 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10335/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recovering geometry, materials, and lighting from photographs is highly ambiguous when only static illumination is available. Active-lighting setups reduce the ambiguity but require dark rooms or specialized hardware. Instead, we synergize both static and flash lighting from casual indoor capture, with the flash on or off, each from independent viewpoints. The flash residual constrains albedo and the BRDF, while static lighting captures grazing-angle specular highlights that flash misses. With a 2DGS reconstruction framing, our key contribution is a GS-anchored diffuse field: a hash-encoded MLP is queried at the rasterized 2DGS depth. As it depends only on world position, it is view consistent in 3D and allows the flash residual to drive material decomposition instead of being absorbed by alpha-blending drift across views. At the same time, we render static lighting with deferred shading such that it can also supervise material decomposition. On five synthetic and three real indoor scenes, our method outperforms six recent baselines on diffuse color, albedo and roughness material parameters, and in relighting where PSNR improves by 4.17 dB over the next-best baseline.
