aiqbench analysis
This research reframes illumination variation from a nuisance factor to an explicit training signal within contrastive learning, improving robustness on standard benchmarks without increasing architectural complexity or training budget. By jointly preserving semantic consistency while remaining sensitive to lighting-dependent structures, the method offers a practical upgrade for visual models operating in environments with significant appearance changes. The approach demonstrates broad applicability across image classification and object detection tasks, suggesting immediate utility for deploying vision systems in real-world conditions with variable lighting.
Lighting-Aware Representation Learning under Controllable Lighting Variation
arXiv:2606.06899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variations in illumination remain a major challenge for visual representation learning, as they induce substantial appearance changes both across and within environments. While existing approaches typically address this issue through data augmentations that encourage models to become invariant to lighting changes, such strategies do not explicitly model lighting information during learning. Inspired by theories of human vision, we propose a lighting-aware representation learning framework that incorporates illumination variation as an explicit training signal rather than a nuisance factor to be suppressed. Our method extends contrastive learning by introducing an auxiliary objective that captures illumination-dependent variation in rendered scenes, enabling the model to jointly learn representations that preserve semantic consistency while remaining sensitive to lighting-dependent visual structure. We evaluate the proposed model on image classification and object detection tasks across the ImageNet, ExDark, and PASCAL VOC benchmarks. Results demonstrate that the proposed lighting-aware training consistently improves downstream performance over standard contrastive learning baselines, while maintaining the same architecture and training budget. Furthermore, our approach shows promising performance in supervised learning frameworks and under settings involving simpler lighting variation, suggesting broad applicability beyond complex illumination scenarios. These results indicate its potential to enhance model robustness and adaptability in complex visual environments as well as in more conventional image processing tasks.
Abstract:Variations in illumination remain a major challenge for visual representation learning, as they induce substantial appearance changes both across and within environments. While existing approaches typically address this issue through data augmentations that encourage models to become invariant to lighting changes, such strategies do not explicitly model lighting information during learning. Inspired by theories of human vision, we propose a lighting-aware representation learning framework that incorporates illumination variation as an explicit training signal rather than a nuisance factor to be suppressed. Our method extends contrastive learning by introducing an auxiliary objective that captures illumination-dependent variation in rendered scenes, enabling the model to jointly learn representations that preserve semantic consistency while remaining sensitive to lighting-dependent visual structure. We evaluate the proposed model on image classification and object detection tasks across the ImageNet, ExDark, and PASCAL VOC benchmarks. Results demonstrate that the proposed lighting-aware training consistently improves downstream performance over standard contrastive learning baselines, while maintaining the same architecture and training budget. Furthermore, our approach shows promising performance in supervised learning frameworks and under settings involving simpler lighting variation, suggesting broad applicability beyond complex illumination scenarios. These results indicate its potential to enhance model robustness and adaptability in complex visual environments as well as in more conventional image processing tasks.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2606.06899 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2606.06899v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.06899 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 308 words