Automatic Sampling for Discontinuities in Differentiable Shaders

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2025)

Yash Belhe¹, Ishit Mehta¹, Wesley Chang¹, Iliyan Georgiev², Michaël Gharbi³, Ravi Ramamoorthi¹, and Tzu-Mao Li¹

¹ University of California San Diego

² Adobe Research

³ Reve

Description

Many tasks in graphics and vision require computing derivatives of integrals of discontinuous functions, which have previously either required specialized routines or suffered from high variance. We introduce a program transform and boundary sampling technique that computes accurate derivatives for arbitrary shader programs, enabling a range of applications such as painterly rendering, CSG, rasterization, discontinuous textures, and more.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Belhe2025ASDDS,
  author = {Belhe, Yash and Mehta, Ishit and Chang, Wesley and Georgiev, Iliyan and Gharbi, Michaël and Ramamoorthi, Ravi and Li, Tzu-Mao},
  title = {Automatic Sampling for Discontinuities in Differentiable Shaders},
  year = {2025},
  issue_date = {December 2025},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {44},
  number = {6},
  journal = {ACM Trans. Graph.},
  month = dec,
  numpages = {19}
}