I am a Research Scientist at Meta Reality Labs. I received my Ph.D. from the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, where I was advised by Shuang Zhao. Prior to UCI, I obtained my M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and my B.Eng. in Software Engineering from Tongji University.
Research:
My research focuses on physics-based differentiable rendering and simulations using Monte Carlo method, with the goal of developing efficient solutions for
inverse problems involving complex geometries to infer material or geometric properties from physical or simulated measurements.
@article{Yu:2025:Grad-WoSt,title={Robust Derivative Estimation with Walk on Stars},author={Yu, Zihan and Sawhney, Rohan and Miller, Bailey and Wu, Lifan and Zhao, Shuang},journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics / SIGGRAPH Asia},volume={44},number={6},year={2025},pages={253:1--253:16},}
@inproceedings{Yu:2024:Diff-WOS,title={A Differential Monte Carlo Solver For the Poisson Equation},author={Yu, Zihan and Wu, Lifan and Zhou, Zhiqian and Zhao, Shuang},booktitle={ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Conference Proceedings},year={2024},}
@inproceedings{yu2023efficient,title={Efficient Path-Space Differentiable Volume Rendering With Respect To Shapes},author={Yu, Zihan and Zhang, Cheng and Maury, Olivier and Hery, Christophe and Dong, Zhao and Zhao, Shuang},booktitle={Computer Graphics Forum},volume={42},number={4},pages={e14884},year={2023},organization={Wiley Online Library},}
@article{Yu:2022:Diff-Pixel,title={Efficient Differentiation of Pixel Reconstruction Filters for Path-Space Differentiable Rendering},author={Yu, Zihan and Zhang, Cheng and Nowrouzezahrai, Derek and Dong, Zhao and Zhao, Shuang},journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics / SIGGRAPH Asia},volume={41},number={6},year={2022},pages={191:1--191:16},}
Efficient Computational Differentiation for Path-Space Differentiable Rendering
@techreport{yu2023computational,title={Efficient Computational Differentiation for Path-Space Differentiable Rendering},author={Yu, Zihan and Zhang, Cheng and Nowrouzezahrai, Derek and Dong, Zhao and Zhao, Shuang},year={2022},institution={University of California, Irvine},month=jan,type={Technical Report},number={UCI-TR-2022-01},note={Technical Report}}
@article{zhang2021path,title={Path-space differentiable rendering of participating media},author={Zhang, Cheng and Yu, Zihan and Zhao, Shuang},journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics / SIGGRAPH},volume={40},number={4},pages={1--15},year={2021},publisher={ACM New York, NY, USA},}
ACM Transactions on Graphics / SIGGRAPH Asia, 2025
In Computer Graphics Forum, 2023
