Radiative Backpropagation with Non-Static Geometry

Abstract

Radiative backpropagation-based (RB) methods efficiently compute reverse-mode derivatives in physically-based differentiable rendering by simulating the propagation of differential radiance. A key assumption is that differential radiance is transported like normal radiance. We observe that this holds only when scene geometry is static and demonstrate that current implementations of radiative backpropagation produce biased gradients when scene parameters change geometry. In this work, we derive the differential transport equation without assuming static geometry. An immediate consequence is that the parameterization matters when the sampling process is not differentiated: only surface integrals allow a local formulation of the derivatives, i.e., one in which moving surfaces do not affect the entire path geometry. While considerable effort has been devoted to handling discontinuities resulting from moving geometry, we show that a biased interior derivative compromises even the simplest inverse rendering tasks, regardless of discontinuities. An implementation based on our derivation leads to systematic convergence to the reference solution in the same setting and provides unbiased RB interior derivatives for path-space differentiable rendering.