English

NRRS: Neural Russian Roulette and Splitting

Graphics 2025-10-10 v1

Abstract

We propose a novel framework for Russian Roulette and Splitting (RRS) tailored to wavefront path tracing, a highly parallel rendering architecture that processes path states in batched, stage-wise execution for efficient GPU utilization. Traditional RRS methods, with unpredictable path counts, are fundamentally incompatible with wavefront's preallocated memory and scheduling requirements. To resolve this, we introduce a normalized RRS formulation with a bounded path count, enabling stable and memory-efficient execution. Furthermore, we pioneer the use of neural networks to learn RRS factors, presenting two models: NRRS and AID-NRRS. At a high level, both feature a carefully designed RRSNet that explicitly incorporates RRS normalization, with only subtle differences in their implementation. To balance computational cost and inference accuracy, we introduce Mix-Depth, a path-depth-aware mechanism that adaptively regulates neural evaluation, further improving efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional heuristics and recent RRS techniques in both rendering quality and performance across a variety of complex scenes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.07868,
  title  = {NRRS: Neural Russian Roulette and Splitting},
  author = {Haojie Jin and Jierui Ren and Yisong Chen and Guoping Wang and Sheng Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.07868},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

15 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:25:54.661Z