GS-ID: Illumination Decomposition on Gaussian Splatting via Adaptive Light Aggregation and Diffusion-Guided Material Priors

Abstract

Gaussian Splatting (GS) has emerged as an effective representation for photorealistic rendering, but the underlying geometry, material, and lighting remain entangled, hindering scene editing. Existing GS-based methods struggle to disentangle these components under non-Lambertian conditions, especially in the presence of specularities and shadows. We propose GS-ID, an end-to-end framework for illumination decomposition that integrates adaptive light aggregation with diffusion-based material priors. In addition to a learnable environment map for ambient illumination, we model spatially-varying local lighting using anisotropic spherical Gaussian mixtures (SGMs) that are jointly optimized with scene content. To better capture cast shadows, we associate each splat with a learnable unit vector that encodes shadow directions from multiple light sources, further improving material and lighting estimation. By combining SGMs with intrinsic priors from diffusion models, GS-ID significantly reduces ambiguity in light-material-geometry interactions and achieves state-of-the-art performance on inverse rendering and relighting benchmarks. Experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of GS-ID for downstream applications such as relighting and scene composition.