Xu Peiyu

Computer Science, UIUC, IL, US
(+1) 949-826-6598  /  peiyuxu3@illinois.edu  /  xupaya.github.io

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Shuang Zhao. My research focuses on differentiable rendering, ray tracing, and neural scene representations, with an emphasis on real-time, GPU-friendly algorithms.

CV (PDF)  /  Google Scholar  /  GitHub  /  LinkedIn  / 

profile photo

Research Interests

Differentiable rendering, Monte Carlo light transport, neural rendering, GPU-accelerated algorithms, and real-time ray tracing.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), US — Sept. 2025 to Present
    Supervisor: Prof. Shuang Zhao
  • B.Eng. in Computer Science, HKUST, Hong Kong, China — Aug. 2018 to Sept. 2022
    Supervisor: Prof. Pedro Sander

Work Experience

  • Research Scientist Intern, Adobe Research, San Jose, US — June 2025 to Sept. 2025
    Advisor: Xin Sun & Ilyan Georgiev; Manager: Kalyan Sunkavalli
  • Research Scientist Intern, Nvidia Real-time Rendering Research, Redmond, US — June 2024 to Sept. 2024
    Advisor: Benedikt Bitterli & Lifan Wu; Manager: Aaron Lefohn
  • Research Assistant, UCSD, San Diego, US — June 2021 to Sept. 2021
    Advisor: Tzu-mao Li
Stochastic Ray Tracing for 3D Gaussian Splatting
Peiyu Xu, Xin Sun, Krishna Mullia, Raymond Fei, Iliyan Georgiev, Shuang Zhao,
CVPR 2026
Project / Paper (Coming Soon)

Efficient and generalizable 3DGS optimization via sorting-free stochastic ray tracing.

Robust and Efficient Differentiable Rendering Through Kernel Density Estimation
Peiyu Xu, Lifan Wu, Benedikt Bitterli, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Shuang Zhao,

Project (Coming Soon)

Kernel-density estimation on parameter space for efficient differentiable and inverse rendering.

Langevin Monte Carlo Based Sampling of Visibility Boundaries
Peiyu Xu, Sai Bangaru, Tzu-mao Li, Shuang Zhao,
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 (conference-track full paper)
Project / Paper

Manifold walk on the geometry silhouette space for efficient sampling of visibility boundaries.

Warped-Area Reparameterization of Differential Path Integrals
Peiyu Xu, Sai Bangaru, Tzu-mao Li, Shuang Zhao,
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2023), 42(6), 2023
Best Paper Award
Project / Paper

Differentiable path integral with divergence-theorem-based interior estimators.

Awards

  • SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Best Paper Award

Skills

  • Languages: C++, Python, PyTorch
  • GPU Programming: Slang.D, CUDA, OptiX, Vulkan

Website template adapted from Jon Barron.