Temporally Stable Generative Illumination with a One-Step Diffusion Model

Abstract

The rapid rise of generative image synthesis has intensified interest in the graphics and vision community in producing realistic, controllable illumination. We present a generative method for screenspace global illumination (GI) that produces geometrically aligned, temporally stable indirect lighting using a single-step latent diffusion model. Unlike iterative and video diffusion methods that are costly and hard to control, our model conditions a one-step image generator on sceneintrinsic signals and sparse lighting hints for the current frame, encoded via adapter modules. To address flicker without the overhead of video diffusion, we introduce a temporal VAE decoder that plugs into a latent diffusion pipeline at inference time, delivering long-range temporal coherence while preserving spatial fidelity. On test data, our approach synthesizes high-quality indirect illumination well-aligned to inputs and improves temporal stability. Our quality evaluation demonstrates that our method generates visually and quantitatively plausible illumination in generative forward rendering, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.