Albedo Estimation via Latent Bridge Matching

In this extended version, we additionally show that conditioning the shading estimator itself on the predicted albedo further improves reconstruction fidelity, and we benchmark our best model against stateof-the-art IID methods across five real and synthetic datasets. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 10 September 2026. Recent advances in Intrinsic Image Decomposition (IID) have increasingly relied on generative models. However, progress remains limited by three key challenges: (a) insufficient physical consistency, (b) high computational cost at inference time, and (c) limited generalization capabilities. In this work, we show that latent bridge matching (LBM) effectively addresses these limitations for albedo estimation. We introduce a novel LBM-based architecture that enforces physical consistency through a pixel reconstruction loss, benefits from the inherent efficiency of LBM low-cost inference, and improves generalization across diverse datasets by incorporating a shading conditioning.

Why it counts

In this extended version, we additionally show that conditioning the shading estimator itself on the predicted albedo further improves reconstruction fidelity, and we benchmark our best model against stateof-the-art IID methods across five real and synthetic datasets. We introduce a novel LBM-based architecture that enforces physical consistency through a pixel reconstruction loss, benefits from the inherent efficiency of LBM low-cost inference, and improves generalization across diverse datasets by incorporating a shading conditioning.

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What is not known

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