Lux Post Facto: Learning Portrait Performance Relighting with Conditional Video Diffusion and a Hybrid Dataset

Video portrait relighting remains challenging because the results need to be both photorealistic and temporally stable. This typically requires a strong model design that can capture complex facial reflections as well as intensive training on a high-quality paired video dataset, such as dynamic one-light-at-a-time (OLAT). In this work, we introduce Lux Post Facto, a novel portrait video relighting method that produces both photorealistic and temporally consistent lighting effects. From the model side, we design a new conditional video diffusion model built upon state-of-the-art pre-trained video diffusion model, alongside a new lighting injection mechanism to enable precise control. This way we leverage strong spatial and temporal generative capability to generate plausible solutions to the ill-posed relighting problem. Our technique uses a hybrid dataset consisting of static expression OLAT data and in-the-wild portrait performance videos to jointly learn relighting and temporal modeling. This avoids the need to acquire paired video data in different lighting conditions. Our extensive experiments show that our model produces state-of-the-art results both in terms of photorealism and temporal consistency.

@article{mei2025_2503.14485,
  title={ Lux Post Facto: Learning Portrait Performance Relighting with Conditional Video Diffusion and a Hybrid Dataset },
  author={ Yiqun Mei and Mingming He and Li Ma and Julien Philip and Wenqi Xian and David M George and Xueming Yu and Gabriel Dedic and Ahmet Levent Taşel and Ning Yu and Vishal M. Patel and Paul Debevec },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.14485},
  year={ 2025 }
}