Transport-view sensitivity visualization

Develop a transport view for sensitivity AOVs that paints each scene parameter where its influence lands, rather than where the parameter is located, while accumulating contributions during the adjoint sweep for a single viewpoint.

Background

The paper’s sensitivity AOVs currently visualize parameters at their spatial placement—for example, coloring a wall according to its reflectance sensitivity. The authors identify a distinct transport view that would instead attribute a parameter’s effect to the locations receiving that effect through light transport, such as showing a wall’s reflectance influence on a table illuminated by interreflection.

Unlike the placement views, this visualization cannot be produced by re-projecting a completed sensitivity buffer. It must accumulate influence contributions during the reverse-mode adjoint sweep and is tied to a single viewpoint. The authors explicitly defer this view, along with a fuller treatment of per-texel sensitivity fields, to future work.

References

The principal open view is the transport view: rather than painting a parameter where it lives, painting it where its influence lands, so that a wall's reflectance colors the table it brightens through interreflection. Unlike the placement views, this cannot re-project a finished buffer: it must accumulate contributions during the adjoint sweep and is tied to a single viewpoint. We leave it, together with a fuller treatment of per-texel fields, which is the least explored case in our current implementation, to future work.

— Sensitivity as an Arbitrary Output Variable for Differentiable Rendering  (2610.10852 - Beresna et al., 7 Oct 2026) in Section 6, “Limitations and Future Work”