Stronger Semantic Encoders Can Harm Relighting Performance: A Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that disentangle scene properties from illumination. Recent methods rely on latent intrinsic representations but remain under-constrained and often fail on challenging materials such as metal and glass. A natural hypothesis is that stronger pretrained visual priors should resolve these failures. We find the opposite: features from top-performing semantic encoders often degrade relighting quality, revealing a fundamental trade-off between semantic abstraction and photometric fidelity. We study this trade-off and introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances semantic context and dense photometric structure by fusing features from a pixel-aligned visual encoder into a latent-intrinsic framework, together with a self-supervised refinement strategy to mitigate the scarcity of paired real-world data. Trained only on unlabeled real-world image pairs and paired with a dense, pixel-aligned visual prior, ALI achieves strong relighting improvements, with the largest gains on complex, specular materials.