Mathematically grounded algorithms for modeling the physical world.
My research sits at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision, and scientific computing, with a particular emphasis on physics-based light transport, differentiable & inverse rendering, and Monte Carlo methods for PDEs. More broadly, I am interested in algorithms for modeling complex physical phenomena and for the analysis, reconstruction, and design of geometry, materials, and illumination from diverse sensor data and physical measurements.
Selected publications
06 / view all →
Stochastic Ray Tracing for the Reconstruction of 3D Gaussian Splatting
The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2026
Robust Derivative Estimation with Walk on Stars
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2025), 44(6), December 2025
Warped-Area Reparameterization of Differential Path Integrals
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2023), 42(6), December 2023
★ Best papers award
Neural-PBIR Reconstruction of Shape, Material, and Illumination
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), October 2023
Path-Space Differentiable Rendering
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2020), 39(4), July 2020
Building Volumetric Appearance Models of Fabric using Micro CT Imaging
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2011), 30(4), July 2011
★ Republished as "Research Highlights" in Communications of the ACM (CACM)
Recent publications
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Sample Matching for Joint Extinction Gradient Estimation in Differentiable Volume Rendering
Ruihan Yu, Yu-Chen Wang, Jingwang Ling, Feng Xu, Shuang Zhao
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2026), 45(4), July 2026
★ Best papers award honorable mention
Gradient Domain Reconstruction for Monte Carlo PDE Solvers
Jiaqi Wu, Xuejun Hu, Shuang Zhao, Kun Xu
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2026), 45(4), July 2026
★ Best papers award honorable mention
Robust Computation of Boundary Path Integrals Using Kernel-Density Estimation
Peiyu Xu, Lifan Wu, Benedikt Bitterli, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Shuang Zhao
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2026), 45(4), July 2026
Adaptive Ray Marching for Rendering Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces
Zhiqian Zhou, Dario Seyb, Shuang Zhao
ACM SIGGRAPH 2026 (conference-track full paper), July 2026
Real-Time Level-of-Detail Rendering with ReSTIR
Yu-Chen Wang, Markus Kettunen, Daqi Lin, Chris Wyman, Lifan Wu, Shuang Zhao
ACM SIGGRAPH 2026 (conference-track full paper), July 2026
Stochastic Ray Tracing for the Reconstruction of 3D Gaussian Splatting
Peiyu Xu, Xin Sun, Krishna Mullia, Raymond Fei, Iliyan Georgiev, Shuang Zhao
The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2026
Recent tutorials
courses · tutorials →
State of the Art in Grid-Free Monte Carlo Methods for Partial Differential Equations
Rohan Sawhney, Bailey Miller, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Keenan Crane, Wojciech Jarosz, Shuang Zhao, Mohammad Sina Nabizadeh, Zilu Li
SIGGRAPH 2025 Course
Physics-Based Differentiable Rendering
Shuang Zhao, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Sai Bangaru
CVPR 2021 Tutorial