TokenLight: Precise Lighting Control in Images using Attribute Tokens
2026-04-16 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a method that lets you change lighting in photos very precisely, adjusting things like brightness, color, and where lights are placed. They treat this as a special image-making task that uses 'attribute tokens' to represent different lighting features. Their system learns from many computer-made images and some real photos to look realistic. It works well on both fake and real pictures, even in tricky cases like lighting through transparent objects, without needing detailed 3D information about the scene.
image relightingconditional image generationattribute tokensillumination3D light positioningsynthetic datasetinverse renderingscene geometryambient illuminationdiffuse reflection
Authors
Sumit Chaturvedi, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Mengwei Ren, Jingyuan Liu, He Zhang, Yiqun Mei, Julie Dorsey, Zhixin Shu
Abstract
This paper presents a method for image relighting that enables precise and continuous control over multiple illumination attributes in a photograph. We formulate relighting as a conditional image generation task and introduce attribute tokens to encode distinct lighting factors such as intensity, color, ambient illumination, diffuse level, and 3D light positions. The model is trained on a large-scale synthetic dataset with ground-truth lighting annotations, supplemented by a small set of real captures to enhance realism and generalization. We validate our approach across a variety of relighting tasks, including controlling in-scene lighting fixtures and editing environment illumination using virtual light sources, on synthetic and real images. Our method achieves state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative performance compared to prior work. Remarkably, without explicit inverse rendering supervision, the model exhibits an inherent understanding of how light interacts with scene geometry, occlusion, and materials, yielding convincing lighting effects even in traditionally challenging scenarios such as placing lights within objects or relighting transparent materials plausibly. Project page: vrroom.github.io/tokenlight/