Tzu-Mao Li
Associate Professor
Develops differentiable rendering and domain-specific languages for graphics and image processing.
Tzu-Mao Li's lab at UCSD works on rendering & appearance. 39 papers since 2023, 14 at top venues, mostly SIGGRAPH Asia and ICCV. 7 PhD students. 33 alumni, most often to NVIDIA and Adobe. Applications close .
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 10/ year
- at T1 venues
- 36%
- PhD students
- 7
- MS students
- 0
- alumni listed
- 33
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 9 papers2026 · T1 3 · collecting
- 10 papers2025 · T1 3
- 10 papers2024 · T1 5
- 10 papers2023 · T1 3
T1 venuesOtherVenues: SIGGRAPH Asia, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, ICML, MobiCom
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Rendering & appearance10 papers
- differentiable8 papers
- differentiable rendering2 papers
- domain-specific languages0 papers
- domain-specific0 papers
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
20269 papers
- SIGGRAPH (T1)A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transaction on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH AsiaDirichlet Splatting: Differentiable Rendering for Wave-Based Inverse Problems (opens in a new tab)
- —numerical integration is just about putting points in the domain and weigh them properly
- MobiCom (T1)Physically Accurate Differentiable Inverse Rendering for Radio Frequency Digital Twin (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transaction on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPHRCGP: Resource Contracts for Graphics Programming (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (will be presented at SIGGRAPHReSTIR BDPT: Bidirectional ReSTIR Path Tracing with Caustics (opens in a new tab)
- EurographicsStochastic Pairwise MIS for Unbiased Large-Kernel Reuse in Real-Time (opens in a new tab)
- SIGGRAPH Asia (T1)Video Numerical Continuation for Differentiable Inverse Rendering (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transaction on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPHYASPS: A Symbolic Framework for Extensible, High-Performance IPC Simulation (opens in a new tab)
202510 papers
- ICCV (T1)A Differentiable Wave Optics Model for End-to-End Computational Imaging System Optimization (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH AsiaAutomatic Sampling for Discontinuities in Differentiable Shaders (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH AsiaDifferentiable Light Transport with Gaussian Surfels via Adapted Radiosity for Efficient Relighting and Geometry Reconstruction (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH AsiaGaussian Integral Linear Operators for Precomputed Graphics (opens in a new tab)
- —HotSpot: Signed Distance Function Optimization with an Asymptotically Sufficient Condition (opens in a new tab)
- TMLR (T1)In-distribution adversarial attacks on object recognition models using gradient-free search (opens in a new tab)
- —modeling light sources in rendering by physically simulating glow discharge, a plasma often seen in neon lights
- SIGGRAPH Asia (T1)Spectral Prefiltering of Neural Fields (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPHTransforming Unstructured Hair Strands into Procedural Hair Grooms (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPHVector-Valued Monte Carlo Integration Using Ratio Control Variates (opens in a new tab)
202410 papers
- SIGGRAPH Asia (T1)BSDF importance sampling using a diffusion model (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (OOPSLADistributions for Compositionally Differentiating Parametric Discontinuities (opens in a new tab)
- ICML (T1)Enhancing Value Function Estimation through First-Order State-Action Dynamics in Offline Reinforcement Learning (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at SIGGRAPHImportance Sampling BRDF Derivatives (opens in a new tab)
- SIGGRAPH Asia (T1)Markov-Chain Monte Carlo Sampling of Visibility Boundaries for Differentiable Rendering (opens in a new tab)
- SIGGRAPH (T1)Neural Geometry Fields for Meshes (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPHReal-Time Path Guiding using Bounding Voxel Sampling (opens in a new tab)
- Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on RenderingResidual Path Integrals for Re-rendering (opens in a new tab)
- SIGGRAPH Asia (T1)Spatiotemporal Bilateral Gradient Filtering for Inverse Rendering (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPHTemporally Stable Metropolis Light Transport Denoising using Recurrent Transformer Blocks (opens in a new tab)
202310 papers
- SIGGRAPH (conference track full paper) /Acting as Inverse Inverse Planning (opens in a new tab)
- Nature Machine Intelligence (T1)Differentiable Visual Computing for Inverse Problems and Machine Learning (opens in a new tab)
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH AsiaDiscontinuity-Aware 2D Neural Fields (opens in a new tab)
- ICCV (T1)FIPT: Factorized Inverse Path Tracing for Efficient and Accurate Material-Lighting Estimation (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)Inferring the Future by Imagining the Past (opens in a new tab)
- —making sampling in inverse rendering faster by reusing information in gradient-based optimization
- Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on RenderingNeural Free-Viewpoint Relighting for Glossy Indirect Illumination (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SCAPhysical Cyclic Animations (opens in a new tab)
- —Slang meets automatic differentiation
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH AsiaWarped-Area Reparameterization of Differential Path Integrals (opens in a new tab)
Where alumni went33 listed, 46% to industry
Industry 6Academia 7
Most often to
- NVIDIA
- Adobe
- Apple
Also to
- Carnegie Mellon University
- MIT
- UC San Diego
Apply to UCSDFall 2027
UCSD CSE Computer Science PhD
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- Single round
- Opens
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- GRE
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- English
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- Fee
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Not yet confirmed for this intake.
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