Specular Polynomials
Zhimin Fan, Jie Guo, Yiming Wang, Tianyu Xiao, Hao Zhang, Chenxi Zhou, Zhenyu Chen, Pengpei Hong, Yanwen Guo, Ling-Qi Yan
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2024)
[Paper] [Supplementary] [Slides] [Code]
a polynomial formulation of specular constraints (multivariate & bivariate), converted into univariate polynomials using resultants, then efficiently solved

Conditional Mixture Path Guiding for Differentiable Rendering
Zhimin Fan, Pengcheng Shi, Mufan Guo, Ruoyu Fu, Yanwen Guo, Jie Guo
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2024)
[Paper] [Slides] [Code]
importance sampling light path derivatives using a deterministic mixture of primal and differential distributions, with the optimal mixture weight conditioned on the BSDF of each vertex in the path prefix

Manifold Path Guiding for Importance Sampling Specular Chains
Zhimin Fan*, Pengpei Hong*, Jie Guo, Changqing Zou, Yanwen Guo, and Ling-Qi Yan
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ASIA 2023)
[Paper] [Supplementary] [Slides] [Code]
importance sampling specular chains with seed placement using continuous probability distributions reconstructed from historical samples