Releasing Walk on Spheres Extensions (WoSX): a GPU-accelerated C++/Python library for Monte Carlo physics simulation on complex geometry. Think path tracing but for physics beyond light transport: heat, electrostatics, potential flow, deformation & more! github.com/nv-tlabs/wosx

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/cool_r... I started to maintain a list of homepages of graphics academics who I think did cool work, are younger than me, and are not my current/past students. It's a living list so if I read any cool papers I'll add the authors to the list. I encourage you to do the same!

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/abstra... Check out the slides of my recent internal talk about abstraction in CS research. Apart from some propaganda of our recent works, the key message is that "abstraction doesn’t, and shouldn’t replace friction" (a corollary of Spolsky's "law of leaky abstraction").

github.com/txstc55/yasps Check out Xuan's work on a new programming language for writing modular and high-performance physical simulation code from energy definition. The key is two differentiable relational operators (join/union) that model the sparsity structure between the attributes and energy.

I helping recalibrate Waterloo’s software engineering program (and to some degree CS) for the age of AI. I wrote an essay on the challenges I’m seeing. www.victorzhong.com/writing/the-...

iveevi.github.io/rcgp/ Check out Venkat's work on a new graphics programming language on statically enforcing correctness of heterogeneous graphics programs (e.g., resources declared on host must match shaders at compile time). The compiler is open sourced and let us know if you have any comment!

Out now: AI and the Murder of Truth. And Air Bud. On AI, education, fascism, paying the Dane-geld, and why there ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball. The follow up to last year’s “You are a better writer than AI.” If you liked that video, this is worth your time. youtu.be/sETvPBVKBAY

For people who are attending Eurographics in the coming week: my student Trevor will talk about his latest work on making ReSTIR efficient when reusing from a large number of neighbors. The key is an unbiased estimation of the MIS weight. See the paper below. research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/pub...

"...it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking." Hannah Arendt, 'The Human Condition', 1958.

EGSR 2026's call for papers is out: egsr2026.inria.fr/call-for-pap...

I have procrastinated on writing so much that I wrote an entire document on writing tips: cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/writin... Probably not much is new but I find I still need to repeat the same things to my students regularly. Will update this document over time hopefully.

"AI has transformed programming forever", but what does that even mean? I mean, Sublime Text has transformed the way I and many programmed forever since it came out (with much less cost), but I don't see the same amount of excitement around it. Sorry, have to rant, back to writing proposals. : (

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/novelt... I gave an internal talk at UCSD last year regarding "novelty" in computer science research. In it I "debunked" some of the myth people seem to have about what is good research in computer science these days. People seemed to like it, so I thought I should share.

Check out our recent SIGGRAPH Asia paper on differentiating programs that integrates over discontinuous functions (yes, again), which got the best paper award! yashbelhe.github.io/asd/index.html The first author Yash is looking for a job yashbelhe.github.io so talk to us if you're interested.

I gave a talk at Pacific Graphics 2025 on the topic of "Classical Computer Graphics in the Age of Generative AI". I've uploaded the recording to Youtube today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyci...

🎄 Introducing our paper A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination lnkd.in/gQUMSAyV . 🙈 Just as Transformers learn long-range relationships between words or pixels, our new paper shows they can also learn how light interacts and bounces around a 3D scene.

Today we're unveiling our newest project: OpenQMC! Developed & contributed to the Foundation by @framestore.bsky.social, OpenQMC aims to improve the fidelity & efficiency of rendering photoreal moving images for film, TV, gaming & advertising. Read more on our blog: www.aswf.io/blog/openqmc...

Anything outside of Nyquist-Shannon limit is "hallucination". It used to have cooler names aliasing/noise. I think the key difference between the two is that human are good at catching aliasing/noise (even anti-aliasing), but not good at noticing hallucination. So "hallucination" feels like cheating

My lab will be recruiting at all levels. PhD students, postdocs, and a research engineering position (worldwide for PhD/postdoc, EU candidates only for the engineering position). If you're at SIGGRAPH, I'd love to talk to you if you are interested in any of these.

"Hallucinations on the future of real-time rendering", High Performance Graphics 2025 keynote: c0de517e.com/023_hpg.htm

Rendering nerds! Check out our latest work "Vector-Valued Monte Carlo Integration Using Ratio Control Variates" that has just gotten the best paper award at SIGGRAPH 2025. This paper presents a method that reduces variance of a wide range of rendering and diff. rendering tasks with negligible cost.

An update, a bit of retrospection, and a call for you, yes, you, to help JCGT a bit: www.realtimerendering.com/blog/jcgt-is...

zeamoxwang.github.io/HotSpot-CVPR... My student Zimo/Cheng's recent work tackles this problem! A lot of recent neural "SDF" optimizers use losses that, even when perfectly minimized, still don't result in actual signed distance fields. Our loss guarantees convergence to distance when minimized.

Announcing SGI 2025! Undergrads and MS students: Apply for 6 weeks of paid summer geometry processing research. No experience needed: 1 week tutorials + 5 weeks of projects. Mentors are top researchers in this emerging branch of graphics/computing/math. sgi.mit.edu

live in about 10 hours from now - subscribe/mark your calendars/tell your friends/share etc. c: Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer www.youtube.com/watch?v=-opB...

Shannon Woods from NVIDIA gave a great presentation on Slang at SIGGRAPH Asia. The slides and video are available on the event page: www.khronos.org/events/siggr...

AI Compiler research intern positions at NVIDIA (Seattle). Functional programming, polyhedral compilation, program synthesis, compiler optimization. Send resume to [email protected]

I'm keeping updated this super comprehensive collection of <Light Transport> papers (by tech and by year), from the Kajiya eq to latest differential and neural approaches, passing by RRT and MC theories | As before, repost if you think it may be useful to others. drive.google.com/drive/folder...

SGP 2025 will take place in Bilbao between June 30th and July 4th, and I am one of the Technical Program Co-Chairs. For the first time, we are introducing an *early* paper deadline on **February 7th**!

If you're interested in a PhD at the intersection of machine learning and programming languages, consider applying to Yale CS! We're exploring new approaches to building software that draws inferences and makes predictions. See alexlew.net for details & apply at gsas.yale.edu/admissions/ by Dec. 15

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/Score_... I wrote down some random notes about the connection between score matching (aka diffusion models) and Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE). It shows why optimal denoising lead to optimal score. Not a new observation but doesn't seem to be talked enough in literature.

Academics! Any tips for increasing class attendance/engagement apart from "gamifying" the participation (i.e., grading the participation)? My lecture attendance has been dropping (even though I personally think my lectures are okay), and it kind of hurt my motivation, so any advice is helpful.

Come catch our BOF at SIGGRAPH Asia today! Learn more about the open source Slang initiative from NVIDIA that is now a part of the Khronos Group family! Learn more: www.khronos.org/events/siggr... #slang #shading #language #compiler

Graphics has long studied how to make: (1) realistic images 📷 (2) non-photorealistic images ✍️ (3) realistic sounds 🎤 What about (4) "non-phono-realistic" sounds? What could that even mean? Next week at SIGGRAPH Asia, MIT undergrad Matt Caren will present our proposal… 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2409.13507

Our group at Google DeepMind is now accepting intern applications for summer 2025. Attached is the official "call for interns" email; the links and email aliases that got lost in the screenshot are below.

Please share: Our lab is looking for new PhD students starting 2025! If you are interested in research in geometry, computational design and digital fabrication, join us at EPFL! More info on the lab: epfl.ch/labs/gcm/ More info on how to apply: www.epfl.ch/education/ph...

My team RGL is looking for new PhD students starting 2025. If you are excited about topics like inverse rendering, compilers for graphics, and physically based modeling then please join us at EPFL. Info about the lab & admission process: rgl.epfl.ch/pages/jobs (Deadline: Dec 15)

Khronos will oversee the open-source Slang shading language and compiler www.khronos.org/news/press/k... This is big. Slang is cross-platform, backward-compatible, and trivial to port to. It supports differentiation/gradient computation as the first-class citizen, allowing to merge ML and graphics.

Hi! I'll share classical and less known graphics (and other) papers here. The first paper I'll share is "Model-Based 3D Hand Pose Estimation from Monocular Video" from de la Gorce et al. in 2011. They proposed one of the first differentiable rasterizers that can properly handle edge discontinuities.