Tzu-Mao Li
cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/
computer graphics, programming systems, machine learning, differentiable graphics
- 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...
- I shared thoughts on what roles "classical graphics" should play in future and also advertise some of our research projects. I also discussed a bit of my thoughts on the field. Take a look if you are interested, or if you have an existential crisis of your graphics-related research or job!
- Reposted by Tzu-Mao Li🎄 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.
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- 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
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- 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.
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- 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.
- Reposted by Tzu-Mao LiAnnouncing 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
- Reposted by Tzu-Mao Lilive 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...
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- Reposted by Tzu-Mao LiIf 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