RadioGS: Radiometrically Consistent Gaussian Surfels for Inverse Rendering

ICLR 2026 (Oral)
KAIST

Overview

Method Overview

Abstract

Inverse rendering with Gaussian Splatting has advanced rapidly, but accurately disentangling material properties from complex global illumination effects, particularly indirect illumination, remains a major challenge. Existing methods often query indirect radiance from Gaussian primitives pre-trained for novel-view synthesis, but these lack supervision for modeling indirect radiances from unobserved views. We introduce radiometric consistency loss, a novel physically-based constraint that provides supervision towards unobserved views by minimizing the residual between each Gaussian primitive's learned radiance and its physically-based rendered counterpart. This establishes a self-correcting feedback loop between physically-based rendering and novel-view synthesis, enabling accurate modeling of inter-reflection. We then propose RadioGS, an inverse rendering framework that efficiently integrates radiometric consistency using Gaussian surfels and 2D Gaussian ray tracing. We further introduce a finetuning-based relighting strategy that adapts Gaussian surfel radiances to new illuminations within minutes, achieving low rendering cost (<10ms). Extensive experiments show that RadioGS outperforms existing Gaussian-based methods while retaining computational efficiency.

Methods

Radiometric Consistency

  • A novel physically-based constraint that guides Gaussian surfels to self-correct their radiance by enforcing consistency between learned surfel radiance and physically-based rendered radiance for unobserved viewpoints. Radiometric Consistency Diagram

RadioGS

  • An inverse rendering framework that efficiently integrates radiometric consistency using Gaussian surfels and differentiable 2D Gaussian ray tracing. Our framework provides a self-correcting feedback loop between physically-based rendering and novel-view synthesis, enabling accurate modeling of inter-reflection for inverse rendering. Method Overview Placeholder

Efficient Relighting

  • Our finetuning-based relighting approach adapts surfel radiances to new lighting condition by enforcing radiometric consistency with physically-based radiance, leading to fast convergence (~2 minutes). This enables real-time rendering (<10ms per frame) by directly rasterizing Gaussian surfels.

Efficient Relighting


Results

Lego Scene Qualitative Results

  • RadioGS shows enhanced decomposition, robust performance on geometrically complex regions, and realistic relighting results. Click the buttons above to switch components.
Lego Scene results

Indirect Illumination Modeling Comparison

  • We made our custom dataset based on TensoIR to obtain ground truth (GT) indirect illumination. RadioGS provides realistic and detailed indirect illumination, while IRGS overestimates and SVG-IR underestimates intensity. Click the buttons above to switch scenes.
Indirect Illumination Comparison

Relighting Performance and Rendering Cost

  • Relighting on “armadillo” scene with fireplace environment showing realistic results and real-time rendering capability on new lighting conditions.

Armadillo Relighting Comparison


Citation

@inproceedings{han2026radiogs,
  title={RadioGS: Radiometrically Consistent Gaussian Surfels for Inverse Rendering},
  author={Han, Kyu Beom and Kim, Jaeyoon and Kim, Woo Jae and Seo, Jinhwan and Yoon, Sung-Eui},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year={2026}
}