Is over-smoothing an expected behavior?

[pureexe]

Hi, thank you for creating RenderFormer — it’s an amazing piece of work!

I’ve been experimenting with the model and noticed a behavior that I’d like to clarify. When I introduce small perturbations to the diffuse component in the H5 file (see left column in the attached image), the RenderFormer output (right column) appears significantly smoother than expected.

In contrast, a standard Blender rendering (middle column) clearly shows these perturbations.

This makes me wonder:

• Is this smoothing behavior an expected characteristic of RenderFormer (e.g., due to learned priors or regularization)?
• Or is it possible that I’m misusing or under-representing the RenderFormer?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for your work!

Data

• Perturbed H5 file: cbox_perturbed.h5
• Blend file (create from H5) : cbox_perturbed.blend