arXiv:2611.13280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) pipelines struggle with severely underexposed images, producing unstable colors, floating artifacts, and incomplete reconstructions in dark regions. To better account for noise in these low-light observations, RAW images offer a natural basis for noise-aware reconstruction by preserving linear sensor measurements and providing access to noise metadata. We present RetinexGS, a RAW-domain 3DGS framework that combines Retinex-inspired appearance modeling with sensor-informed optimization for low-light novel-view synthesis. We factorize each Gaussian's color into a view-independent base color and a shared, position- and view-dependent modulation field, regularizing the two components separately to constrain appearance learning from noisy observations. We use DNG noise metadata to weight the reconstruction loss for signal-dependent noise, while distortion-aware rendering avoids spatially resampling RAW targets. To address sparse geometry in dark regions, we introduce depth-guided initialization. We evaluate RetinexGS on three public RawNeRF scenes and two custom-captured low-light RAW scenes. With all methods trained on the same RAW inputs for each scene, RetinexGS outperforms LE3D and RawNeRF in mean sRGB PSNR by 2.18 dB and 2.71 dB respectively, across the five scenes, while supporting real-time novel-view rendering.