Generative diffusion models have advanced image editing by delivering high-quality results through intuitive interfaces such as prompts, scribbles, and semantic drawing. However, these interfaces lack precise control, and associated editing methods often specialize in a single task. We introduce a versatile workflow for a range of editing tasks which operates in an intrinsic-image latent space, enabling semantic, local manipulation with pixel precision while automatically handling effects like reflections and shadows. We build on the RGB↔X diffusion framework and address its key deficiencies: the lack of identity preservation and the need to update multiple channels to achieve plausible results. We propose an edit-friendly diffusion inversion and prompt-embedding optimization to enable precise and efficient editing of only the relevant channels. Our method achieves identity preservation and resolves global illumination, without requiring task-specific model fine-tuning. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across a variety of tasks on complex images, including material adjustments, object insertion and removal, global relighting, and their combinations.

Radiance fields are powerful and, hence, popular models for representing the appearance of complex scenes. Yet, constructing them based on image observations gives rise to ambiguities and uncertainties. We propose a versatile approach for learning Gaussian radiance fields with explicit and fine-grained uncertainty estimates that impose only little additional cost compared to uncertainty-agnostic training. Our key observation is that uncertainties can be modeled as a low-dimensional manifold in the space of radiance field parameters that is highly amenable to Monte Carlo sampling. Importantly, our uncertainties are differentiable and, thus, allow for gradient-based optimization of subsequent captures that optimally reduce ambiguities. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on next-best-view planning tasks, including high-dimensional illumination planning for optimal radiance field relighting quality.

Inverse rendering, the process of inferring scene properties from images, is a challenging inverse problem. The task is ill-posed, as many different scene configurations can give rise to the same image. Most existing solutions incorporate priors into the inverse-rendering pipeline to encourage plausible solutions, but they do not consider the inherent ambiguities and the multi-modal distribution of possible decompositions. In this work, we propose a novel scheme that integrates a denoising diffusion probabilistic model pre-trained on natural illumination maps into an optimization framework involving a differentiable path tracer. The proposed method allows sampling from combinations of illumination and spatially-varying surface materials that are, both, natural and explain the image observations. We further conduct an extensive comparative study of different priors on illumination used in previous work on inverse rendering. Our method excels in recovering materials and producing highly realistic and diverse environment map samples that faithfully explain the illumination of the input images.

Differentiable rendering has received increasing interest for image-based inverse problems. It can benefit traditional optimization-based solutions to inverse problems, but also allows for self-supervision of learning-based approaches for which training data with ground truth annotation is hard to obtain. However, existing differentiable renderers either do not model visibility of the light sources from the different points in the scene, responsible for shadows in the images, or are very slow which makes it difficult to train deep architectures over thousands of iterations. To this end, we propose an accurate yet efficient approach for differentiable visibility and soft shadow computation. Our approach is based on the spherical harmonics approximations of the scene illumination and visibility, where the occluding surface is approximated with spheres. This allows for a significantly more efficient shadow computation compared to methods based on ray tracing. As our formulation is differentiable, it can be used to solve inverse problems such as texture, illumination, rigid pose, and geometric deformation recovery from images using analysis-by-synthesis optimization.