GAINS: Gaussian-based Inverse Rendering from Sparse Multi-View Captures
Authors: Patrick Noras, Jun Myeong Choi, Didier Stricker, Pieter Peers, Roni Sengupta
Organizations: University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Kaiserslautern, Germany · German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Kaiserslautern, Germany · University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA · College of William & Mary, VA, USA
Recent advances in Gaussian Splatting-based inverse rendering extend Gaussian primitives with shading parameters and physically grounded light transport, enabling high-quality material recovery from dense multi-view captures. However, the accuracy of these methods degrades under sparse-view settings, where limited observations lead to severe ambiguity between geometry, reflectance, and lighting. We introduce GAINS (Gaussian-based Inverse rendering from Sparse multi-view captures), a two-stage inverse rendering framework that leverages foundation models as priors to stabilize geometry and material estimation. The core technical contribution of this paper is an inverse rendering framework that unifies foundation model priors with physically-based representations in an optimization scheme. GAINS first refines geometry using monocular depth, normal, and diffusion priors, and then employs segmentation, intrinsic image decomposition (IID), and diffusion priors to regularize material recovery. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that GAINS significantly improves material parameter accuracy, relighting quality, and novel-view synthesis compared to state-of-the-art Gaussian-based inverse rendering methods. While GAINS outperforms and remains competitive across a wide range of objects captured with 4 to 32 cameras, the improvement is particularly pronounced under sparse-view settings, where ambiguity is high and learning-based priors become especially beneficial. Project page: https://patrickbail.github.io/gains/
Inverse rendering aims to recover both 3D geometry and physically meaningful material properties from images, enabling applications such as relighting and novel view synthesis. Optimization-based methods achieve high fidelity but require costly per-scene fitting, while image-space learning-based approaches often suffer from multi-view inconsistencies and lack an explicit 3D representation for stable novel view rendering. We present a feed-forward multi-view reconstruction framework for inverse rendering that directly predicts a structured 3D Gaussian representation with intrinsic material attributes. Each Gaussian primitive is parameterized by mean, normal, opacity, rotation, scale, albedo, metallic, and roughness, enabling a disentangled and physically grounded scene representation. Our model integrates priors from a material estimation network with a multi-view 3D reconstruction backbone, allowing joint prediction of geometry and reflectance parameters in a single forward pass. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate improved multi-view consistency compared to 2D baselines, accurate material recovery, and stable novel view rendering. Our representation further supports physically-based relighting and more faithful modeling of view-dependent effects compared to existing RGB-based feed-forward reconstruction methods. Our project webpage is: \href.
Gaussian Splatting (GS) excels at novel-view synthesis but encodes baked-in radiance, tightly entangling illumination with geometry and preventing seamless integration into physically based rendering (PBR) pipelines. Existing inverse-rendering methods attempt to disentangle materials via joint optimization, but often suffer from competing objectives that cause severe ambiguities and residual lighting artifacts. To overcome this, we present GS-PI, a novel optimization-decoupled framework that casts PBR material generation as a geometry-conditioned diffusion process on 3D point clouds. By operating directly in the 3D domain, our method inherently guarantees multi-view consistency, sidestepping the severe pixel correspondence issues that challenge 2D diffusion approaches. We introduce a multi-scale cross-view conditioning mechanism that integrates three complementary components: a global semantic prior, source-anchored photometric cues, and an absolute spatial learned view-direction conditioning signal. This design efficiently compresses complex multi-view evidence, mitigating cross-view projection misalignment and successfully preventing specular highlights from baking into intrinsic colors. By extracting a point cloud from a pre-trained Gaussian model, predicting PBR attributes via conditional diffusion, and distilling them back through differentiable rasterisation, we yield a fully relightable PBR-GS asset. GS-PI outperforms recent inverse-rendering baselines while replacing per-scene joint illumination/BRDF optimization with a learned diffusion pass followed by a short target-driven distillation, without requiring proxy meshes.
Faithful inverse rendering requires visibility and indirect radiance to explain secondary illumination and inter-reflection, yet rasterization-oriented Gaussian representations do not naturally support the secondary-ray queries needed to recover them. We present IRGS++ (Inter-Reflective Gaussian Splatting), a unified robust and efficient Gaussian inverse rendering framework. During transport-aware optimization, IRGS++ employs differentiable 2D Gaussian ray tracing on surface-oriented Gaussian primitives to query visibility and indirect radiance on the fly and evaluate the full rendering equation for inter-reflective transport. This physical core makes Gaussian inverse rendering physically grounded beyond rasterized appearance modeling. To make this backbone useful beyond low-gloss dielectric scenes, the framework incorporates metallic-aware material modeling and robust reflective initialization for glossy, specular, and metallic materials. To make it practical, multiple importance sampling and denoising stabilize finite-sample rendering, while mesh-based secondary-attribute queries reduce the cost of relighting under novel illumination. Quantitative evaluations on low-gloss and glossy benchmarks show improved decomposition and relighting quality together with favorable quality--speed trade-offs under the reported configurations, while real-world studies illustrate plausible relighting under novel illumination.