Robust Computation of Boundary Path Integrals Using Kernel-Density Estimation

To enable differentiation with respect to object geometries, boundary path integrals—central to physics-based differentiable rendering—must be estimated numerically. Although their mathematical formulation is well established, designing efficient and robust numerical estimators remains challenging. Most state-of-the-art boundary sampling methods rely on primary-sample-space guiding, which tends to break down on finely tessellated geometries; reparameterization-based alternatives, meanwhile, often incur high variance and/or significant computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce a simple, robust, and consistent solution to this problem. At the core of our approach is a novel formulation of the boundary integral based on kernel-density estimation. Much like photon mapping, we slightly expand the measure-zero domain of integration with a kernel, sidestepping the need to sample directly on a delta-function region in path space. To our knowledge, this is the first such application of kernel-density methods for boundary integral evaluation. We validate our method by comparing its derivative estimates against finite differences (FD), and further demonstrate its practical utility by benchmarking against several state-of-the-art baselines in synthetic inverse-rendering scenarios.