RADIANT: Object-Centric Feed-Forward Global Illumination

Abstract

Feed-forward neural renderers synthesize global illumination across novel 3D scenes without per-scene optimization or runtime ray tracing. Existing transformer-based renderers tokenize individual triangles, so self-attention scales quadratically with mesh resolution. Yet macroscopic radiative transport is governed by the underlying surface geometry and object arrangements rather than a particular mesh discretization; finer tessellation can thus inflate token counts without changing the underlying transport physics, motivating a discretization-agnostic and object-centric representation. We introduce RADIANT (RADiance-based Inter-Actor Neural Transformer), an object-centric architecture for feed-forward global illumination from point inputs. By representing each object with a compact budget of 32 surface-patch tokens, RADIANT decouples attention sequence length from polygon counts. In a single network, an inter-object scene transformer models 3D radiative exchange and a view decoder renders images at target camera poses. To capture light transport without materializing O(N^2) bias matrices, invariant form-factor attention embeds geometric distances and surface orientations directly into query-key dot products as SE(3)-invariant inner products weighted by learned area and material gains. For primary visibility without mesh connectivity, camera rays cross-attend scene tokens guided by depth-tested point splats in a shared spherical frame. Across a 1.03M-scene benchmark under matched model capacity, RADIANT reaches 25 dB tone-mapped PSNR in 5x fewer training steps than RenderFormer, and achieves 32.2 dB at 600k steps (+3.3 dB over RenderFormer and +7.6 dB over RenderFormer-V2). We further demonstrate the scalability of RADIANT, which completes a 512x512 forward pass of a 500-object scene in 0.83 s, with computational cost scaling with the number of objects rather than polygons.