FlaRe

Floating Radiance Networks

Explicit ray-traceable geometry with continuous local neural radiance.

Krzysztof Byrski^1,*,† Rafał Tobiasz^1,3,* Grzegorz Wilczyński^1,3 Mikołaj Zieliński² Dawid Baran Dominik Belter² Jacek Tabor¹ Przemysław Spurek^1,3

¹Jagiellonian University ²Poznań University of Technology ³IDEAS Research Institute

^* Equal contribution ^† Corresponding author

arXiv PDF Code

A complete walkthrough of FlaRe, from its local neural radiance representation to ray tracing and geometry manipulation.

Abstract

One representation.
Not one rendering paradigm.

Recent neural scene representations enable photorealistic novel-view synthesis, but most remain tightly coupled to a single rendering paradigm. Floating Radiance Networks (FlaRe) combine explicit ray-traceable geometry with continuous neural radiance functions.

A scene is represented by floating planar generalized Gaussian primitives. Each primitive carries a compact descriptor of a local radiance field, while one lightweight decoder maps the descriptor, local surface coordinates, and viewing direction to color and opacity.

This explicit structure enables interactive rendering and recursive ray tracing—alongside deformation, mesh extraction, stylization, and compact scene modeling.

Method

Local fields on explicit geometry

FlaRe keeps the flexibility of a neural field while making every scene element directly queryable and editable.

Floating primitives

Planar generalized Gaussians provide explicit, hardware-compatible geometry.

Local ray queries

Every hit produces local coordinates and a viewing direction.

Shared decoder

A compact network decodes continuous color and opacity at the intersection.

Descriptor+Local coordinates+View direction→Color & opacity

Capabilities

Built to be changed

Six focused, looping demonstrations. Each one operates directly on the same learned FlaRe scene.

Geometry editing

Edit the Garden scene

Primitive-level deformation transfers edits from proxy geometry back to the learned scene without retraining.

Hybrid ray tracing

Fiat 126p meets Garden

Conventional mesh objects integrate seamlessly with the neural scene, including environment reflections and secondary rays.

03–04

Appearance editing

Style transfer stays ray-traceable

Secondary rays query the modified descriptor space directly. No separate ray-tracing representation is needed.

Garden · multiple styles + ray tracing

Kitchen · style transfer + ray tracing

Material response

Glass, metal, and mirrors in Dr. Johnson

Material-dependent reflection and refraction demonstrate recursive ray queries through both neural primitives and mesh geometry.

Mesh extraction

From descriptor field to mesh

A single Garden trajectory reveals the learned descriptor field, depth, surface normals, and finally the extracted geometry—first as a gray mesh, then with color.

Results

Compact and competitive

High-quality novel-view synthesis in an explicitly ray-queryable scene representation.

PSNR28.93dB ↑

Rendering16.53FPS ↑

Memory207MB ↓

RepresentationUnifiedrender · trace · edit

Selected results on Mip-NeRF 360. See the paper for complete comparisons on Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks and Temples, and Deep Blending.

Citation

Build on FlaRe

@article{byrski2026flare,
  title   = {FlaRe: Floating Radiance Networks},
  author  = {Byrski, Krzysztof and Tobiasz, Rafał and Wilczyński, Grzegorz and
             Zieliński, Mikołaj and Baran, Dawid and Belter, Dominik and
             Tabor, Jacek and Spurek, Przemysław},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.05920},
  year    = {2026}
}