Understanding reflection remains a long-standing challenge in 3D reconstruction due to the entanglement of appearance and geometry under view-dependent reflections. In this work, we present the Pygmalion Effect in Vision, a novel framework that metaphorically "sculpts" reflective objects into clay-like forms through image-to-clay translation. We then introduce a dual-branch design in which a BRDF-based reflective branch and a clay-guided branch share the same Gaussian geometry but operate through independent rendering paths. The clay-guided branch, supervised by the synthesized clay images, provides reflection-free geometric guidance that complements the photometric supervision of the BRDF branch. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show consistent improvements in both geometry and photometric metrics. Beyond technical gains, our framework reveals that seeing by unshining, translating radiance into neutrality, can serve as a powerful inductive bias for reflective object geometry learning.
Streaming video understanding (SVU) requires models to answer user queries over continuously evolving video streams. Unlike offline video QA, SVU must handle queries whose evidence may lie in the past, appear in the current scene, or emerge only after future observations. Existing streaming video systems often rely on compact visual memories or fixed evidence-access schemes, which can lose fine-grained details and fail to adapt the answering process to the temporal intent of each query. In this paper, we propose TimeTraveler, a streaming VQA framework that performs temporal strategy planning with a Time Dictionary. Inspired by the need to search across different temporal regions of a stream, TimeTraveler stores each observed moment as a timestamp-indexed structured caption and uses this dictionary as an explicit source of queryable evidence. Given a query, TimeTraveler determines whether to recall past evidence, read the present context, or wait for future observations, and then applies a strategy-specific evidence acquisition process. Comparative experiments on streaming video QA benchmarks show that TimeTraveler improves streaming question answering by preserving fine-grained temporal evidence and selecting the appropriate temporal strategy for each query. The project page is available at https://geppa.github.io/TimeTraveler.