LiTo: Surface Light Field Tokenization

Existing 3D relighting methods operate through either explicit material decomposition, diffusion-based view-space generation, or a combination of both, requiring full recomputation for each new lighting condition. We observe that recent latent scene representations, which encode multi-view images into a set of compact tokens with no fixed physical semantics, open up a novel design space for relighting. We present LumiTokens, a framework that formulates 3D relighting as a direct transformation on latent scene tokens, without explicit 3D representations, rendering equations, or physics-based decomposition. Our model introduces a Scene Token Editor that processes scene tokens jointly with light-ray tokens through self-attention, producing updated tokens that can be decoded into multi-view-consistent relit images. To support diverse lighting types through a unified interface, all lighting signals, including environment maps, point lights, and area lights, are parameterized as Plucker ray tokens, enabling native 3D user interaction with a representation that carries no explicit spatial structure. Crucially, this design supports progressive relighting: because the editor's output remains in the same latent space as its input, a user can incrementally build up illumination one light source at a time, with each edit composing in token space. Experiments demonstrate that LumiTokens achieves comparable or superior relighting quality to other methods and supports progressive, composable lighting edits. Project page: https://neu-vi.github.io/LumiTokens/

Recent video world models have increasingly adopted 3D memory mechanisms to integrate historical observations into a lightweight and persistent scene representation. This naturally raises a complementary question: if 3D representations can serve as an effective mechanism for memorizing observed scenes, can they also be directly used as the latent space for reconstructing and generating scenes? Motivated by this idea, we represent a scene as a compact and unstructured 3D-anchored latent space (SceneAE). Each latent combines an explicit 3D position with an implicit content feature and is spatially grounded to describe its local scene region, forming a sparse latent point cloud. Unlike conventional video-VAE latents that describe how a scene appears from particular viewpoints, our representation directly describes the scene itself, making it naturally applicable to both reconstruction and generation. For reconstruction, once the scene has been generated, our persistent 3D representation can be projected and decoded into RGB-D observations by different target cameras, without the need to regenerate a video for each new camera trajectory. For generation, we leverage the geometry-content separation to first generate camera-controlled 3D geometry and then synthesize content conditioned on it, reducing camera-appearance entanglement and improving camera controllability. Experiments show that this 3D latent achieves superior generation quality, computational cost, and camera controllability.

High-fidelity image-to-3D generation requires a 3D representation that captures both geometry and appearance. However, preserving fine detail across the physically based rendering (PBR) modalities needed for relighting remains challenging. To address this, we propose Luce, a 3D representation that unifies geometry and PBR materials within a voxelized multimodal Gaussian cloud, using dedicated Gaussian primitives for albedo, metallic-roughness, and surface normals. A variational autoencoder compresses this representation into a unified material-aware latent space. A rectified-flow transformer generates this latent from a single image using multi-layer features from a pretrained image encoder that preserve both semantic context and fine spatial detail. The latent is then decoded into relightable PBR Gaussians and an optional textured mesh with a tangent-space normal map. On Toys4K, Luce achieves state-of-the-art single-image-to-3D generation, improving FID by 28% over the strongest baseline. We further evaluate Luce on a benchmark of AI-generated images depicting diverse subjects and materials, where it improves the CLIP image-alignment score over the best baseline (0.8519 vs. 0.8299). Luce generates relightable, geometrically accurate, and materially faithful assets that preserve fine details such as text, logos, and inscriptions.