arXiv:2609.27600v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Creating animatable and relightable human avatars from multi-view images remains challenging, as pose-dependent deformation, materials, and light visibility are tightly coupled in images. In this paper, we present ARS-Avatar, a novel method using surfel representation for high-quality, animatable, and relightable human avatars from multi-view images captured under unknown illumination. For faithful surfel estimation, we extract deformation displacement and body model deviation two priors from the mesh, which jointly capture local deformation complexity and serve as auxiliary. We employ deferred shading to estimate BRDF materials and further introduce a differentiable screen-space ambient occlusion formulation that enables gradient-based optimization of body-part specific occlusion radii through finite differences, providing an efficient approximation of light visibility that can be jointly optimized with the avatar. Extensive experiments show that ARS-Avatar achieves competitive or improved radiance reconstruction on multiple metrics and consistently outperforms the evaluated PBR relighting baselines, while enabling realistic animation and relighting under novel poses and illuminations.