We present LightMover, a framework for controllable light manipulation in single images that leverages video diffusion priors to produce physically plausible illumination changes without re-rendering the scene. We formulate light editing as a sequence-to-sequence prediction problem in visual token space: given an image and light-control tokens, the model adjusts light position, color, and intensity together with resulting reflections, shadows, and falloff from a single view. This unified treatment of spatial (movement) and appearance (color, intensity) controls improves both manipulation and illumination understanding. We further introduce an adaptive token-pruning mechanism that preserves spatially informative tokens while compactly encoding non-spatial attributes, reducing control sequence length by 41% while maintaining editing fidelity. To train our framework, we construct a scalable rendering pipeline that generates large numbers of image pairs across varied light positions, colors, and intensities while keeping the scene content consistent with the original image. LightMover enables precise, independent control over light position, color, and intensity, and achieves high PSNR and strong semantic consistency (DINO, CLIP) across different tasks.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of LightMover. Left: our sequence-to-sequence formulation encodes a reference image, object crop, movement map, and optional color/intensity controls as input frames. Right: additional supported tasks, including light removal and insertion.
Figure 3: Illustration of training samples. Top: our synthetic data varies from scenes, objects, and lighting conditions; Bottom: the image relighting post-processing during training.
Figure 4: Comparison of light movement results. The blue bounding box in the input indicates the target light location. For Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image , the first column shows the two-step modular editing setup, and the second column shows the one-step editing result. Compared with ObjectMover , LightMover accurately handles light propagation and its interaction with the environment. Compared with Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image , LightMover provides more precise control and produces more coherent and photometrically consistent relighting.
Method
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
Qwen-Image [ 59 ]
19.01
69.94
87.27
Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image* [ 45 ]
18.18
52.06
82.21
Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image [ 45 ]
19.59
72.46
89.72
ObjectMover [ 65 ]
19.49
78.12
90.48
LightMover (ours)
20.38
81.27
91.85
w/ adaptive pruning
20.39
80.26
91.42
Table 1: Quantitative comparison on light movement. LightMover outperforms prior methods on the light-movement task in all metrics. * indicate one-step editing set up.
Method
Light Color Change
Light Intensity Change
Combine
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
Qwen-Image [ 59 ]
18.49
68.90
87.72
20.41
71.05
88.96
17.12
67.85
87.30
Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image [ 45 ]
22.14
81.72
88.65
25.09
80.93
89.14
18.42
76.21
88.22
LightMover (ours)
24.06
85.34
90.90
27.12
83.04
91.58
19.97
79.86
91.02
w/ adaptive pruning
24.15
85.30
91.40
27.01
83.11
91.21
19.88
78.92
90.66
Table 2: Quantitative comparison on light color change, intensity change, and their combination.
Figure 5: Light insertion/removal results. Compared to Nano-Banana [ 45 ] , LightMover produces more physically consistent edits, preserving background while correctly adding or removing illumination effects associated with the target light source.
Method
Object Movement
Object Insertion
Object Removal
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
Drag-Anything [ 61 ]
16.36
55.56
84.44
-
-
-
-
-
-
3DiT [ 33 ]
19.72
45.30
81.69
-
-
-
20.52
41.83
85.02
Paint-by-Example [ 63 ]
20.83
55.46
85.23
22.64
54.80
81.81
-
-
-
Anydoor [ 9 ]
21.86
69.32
88.95
24.10
77.49
88.33
-
-
-
MagicFixup [ 2 ]
23.82
78.49
91.06
-
-
-
-
-
-
Table 3: Quantitative comparison on object movement, insertion, and removal. Best results are in bold and second-best are underlined .
Training Data
Light Movement
Light Aug.
Color
Intensity
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
✗
✗
✗
19.88
79.93
91.06
✓
✗
✗
20.07
79.73
91.62
✓
✓
✗
20.25
81.02
91.02
✓
✗
✓
20.11
80.73
90.66
✓
✓
✓
20.38
81.27
91.85
Table 4: Ablation on training data composition for Light Movement. We study the contribution of each augmentation: Light Aug. , Color Change , and Intensity Change .
Method
PSNR ↑
DINO ↑
CLIP ↑
LightMover (ours)
19.97
79.86
91.02
w/ adaptive pruning (ours)
19.88
78.92
90.66
w/o frame as condition
19.53
77.32
90.01
w/o object frame
19.27
78.59
89.93
w/o adaptive downsample
19.38
75.62
89.81
Table 5: Ablation on Light Movement with color change. We set LightMover as the baseline and study variants: (i) w/o frame as condition , (ii) w/o object frame , (iii) w/o adaptive downsampling .
Appendix figures & tables13 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 6: Comparison with ground-truth images. We show side-by-side comparisons between LightMover predictions and ground-truth photographs captured by the same camera under the same ambient conditions but with the light source physically relocated.
Figure 7: Qualitative results for Table 4 (training data ablation). With the proposed synthetic rendering data pipeline (Light Aug.), the model generalizes to complex shadow handling (e.g., leaf shading). Incorporating color and intensity variations further improves the modeling of light contributions and their combinations.
Figure 8: Comparison with the learnable embedding variant. We evaluate the move-with-color-change task, where the colored dot in the top-left indicates the target color. The LightLab variant with learnable embeddings fails to correctly encode color conditions when movement and color changes are applied together.
Figure 9: Concise prompt for the one-step editing.
Figure 10: Basic prompt variant for the one-step editing. This prompt emphasizes physical correctness and globally consistent relighting.
Figure 11: “Precise” step-by-step prompt variant for the one-step editing. This version enforces explicit reasoning over shadow geometry, reflectance behavior, and scene consistency.
Figure 12: Light movement results for Nano-Banana [ 45 ] one-step editing. We show the input reference image and the results of using different prompts.
Figure 13: Light movement results for Nano-Banana [ 45 ] two-step editing. We show the input reference image for removal and insertion tasks, and the results.
Figure 14: Removal prompt for the two-step Nano-Banana editing.
Figure 15: Insertion prompt for the two-step Nano-Banana editing.
Figure 16: Surface interaction results. Examples of diffuse shading, specular highlights, and material-dependent responses under light movement.
Figure 17: Cast shadow results. Examples demonstrating changes in shadow direction, softness, and occlusion structure.
Figure 18: Reflection results. Examples of updated highlight positions and reflective consistency after repositioning the light source.
We propose a fine-tuning method for flow-matching diffusion models aimed at realistic artificial light modeling without the need for a large training dataset. We address the task of controllable interior image editing, where the goal is to turn artificial light sources on or off while preserving the scene geometry, object placement, materials, and visual identity of the original image. To achieve this, we decompose the task into two independent formulations. We introduce the LoRA Direction Training Method, which extracts the pure direction of the LoRA adapter effect in the diffusion model flow field, and we also introduce specialized loss functions to ensure the realism of the inverse transformation. Additionally, the resulting increment map is used for more precise adjustment of the lighting color and temperature.
Recent diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image relighting, and this success has quickly been extended to video relighting. However, existing methods offer limited explicit control over illumination in the relighted output. We present LightCtrl, the first controllable video relighting method that enables explicit control of video illumination through a user-supplied light trajectory in a training-free manner. Our approach combines pre-trained diffusion models: an image relighting model processes each frame individually, followed by a video diffusion prior to enhance temporal consistency. To achieve explicit control over dynamically varying lighting, we introduce two key components. First, a Light Map Injection module samples light trajectory-specific noise and injects it into the latent representation of the source video, improving illumination coherence with the conditional light trajectory. Second, a Geometry-Aware Relighting module dynamically combines RGB and normal map latents in the frequency domain to suppress the influence of the original lighting, further enhancing adherence to the input light trajectory. Experiments show that LightCtrl produces high-quality videos with diverse illumination changes that closely follow the specified light trajectory, demonstrating improved controllability over baseline methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/GVCLab/LightCtrl.
Yizuo Peng, Xuelin Chen, Kai Zhang +1
Tsinghua University · GVC Lab, Great Bay University · Adobe Research
Single-image relighting is highly under-constrained: small illumination changes can produce large, nonlinear variations in shading, shadows, and specularities, while geometry and materials remain unobserved. Existing diffusion-based approaches either rely on intrinsic or G-buffer pipelines that require dense and fragile supervision, or operate purely in latent space without physical grounding, making fine-grained control of direction, intensity, and color unreliable. We observe that a full intrinsic decomposition is unnecessary and redundant for accurate relighting. Instead, sparse but physically meaningful cues, indicating where illumination should change and how materials should respond, are sufficient to guide a diffusion model. Based on this insight, we introduce LightCtrl that integrates physical priors at two levels: a few-shot latent proxy encoder that extracts compact material-geometry cues from limited PBR supervision, and a lighting-aware mask that identifies sensitive illumination regions and steers the denoiser toward shading relevant pixels. To compensate for scarce PBR data, we refine the proxy branch using a DPO-based objective that enforces physical consistency in the predicted cues. We also present ScaLight, a large-scale object-level dataset with systematically varied illumination and complete camera-light metadata, enabling physically consistent and controllable training. Across object and scene level benchmarks, our method achieves photometrically faithful relighting with accurate continuous control, surpassing prior diffusion and intrinsic-based baselines, including gains of up to +2.4 dB PSNR and 35% lower RMSE under controlled lighting shifts.