News Release

UC San Diego Computer Scientists Win Best Paper Award at SIGGRAPH 2025

August 27, 2025--

Computer science faculty member Tzu-Mao Li and his research team won a best paper award at SIGGRAPH 2025 for their work titled "Vector-valued Monte Carlo Integration using Ratio Control Variates."

The conference took place Aug. 10 to 14 in Vancouver, Canada. 

The work was led by Ph.D. student Haolin Lu, with PhD student Wesley Chang, and Delio Vicini at Google. The researchers showed that you can simultaneously reduce variance of all channels (e.g., RGB or derivative components) in rendering by reweighting your Monte Carlo samples using a type of "ratio estimator.” In the past 40 years or so people only could reduce variance of one channel or a weighted average of the channels. This method can automatically make almost every part in a renderer (and a differentiable renderer) faster with almost negligible computational cost. This method could be adopted soon in production, both offline rendering and real-time rendering, and even in inverse renderers.

The work was one of 15 papers UC San Diego researchers presented at the conference–about 5% of all papers. 

Media Contacts

Ioana Patringenaru
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-822-0899
ipatrin@ucsd.edu