VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Alex Evans
dblp:171/3506
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10ranked-venue papers
0as first author
10since 2021 · last 2024
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 6 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 6 · 6 since 2021Theory of computation · 2 · 2 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021Security and privacy · 1 · 1 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | The Geometry of Constant Function Market MakersabstractConstant function market makers (CFMMs) are the most popular type of decentralized trading venue for cryptocurrency tokens. In this paper, we give a very general geometric framework (or 'axioms') which encompass and generalize many of the known results for CFMMs in the literature, without requiring strong conditions such as differentiability or homogeneity. One particular consequence of this framework is that every CFMM has a (unique) canonical trading function that is concave, homogeneous, and nondecreasing, showing that many results known only for homogeneous trading functions are actually fully general. We also show that CFMMs satisfy a number of intuitive and geometric composition rules, and give a new proof, via conic duality, of the equivalence of the portfolio value function and the trading function. Many results are extended to the general setting where the CFMM is not assumed to be path-independent, but only one trade is allowed. Finally, we show that all 'path-independent' CFMMs have a simple geometric description that does not depend on any notion of a 'trading history'. Many of the results here depend on a type of duality for concave, homogeneous, and nondecreasing functions which may be of independent interest. Guillermo Angeris, Tarun Chitra, Theo Diamandis, Kshitij Kulkarni, Alex Evans |
EC | 5 |
| 2024 | Real-time Neural Appearance ModelsabstractWe present a complete system for real-time rendering of scenes with complex appearance previously reserved for offline use. This is achieved with a combination of algorithmic and system level innovations. Our appearance model utilizes learned hierarchical textures that are interpreted using neural decoders, which produce reflectance values and importance-sampled directions. To best utilize the modeling capacity of the decoders, we equip the decoders with two graphics priors. The first prior—transformation of directions into learned shading frames—facilitates accurate reconstruction of mesoscale effects. The second prior—a microfacet sampling distribution—allows the neural decoder to perform importance sampling efficiently. The resulting appearance model supports anisotropic sampling and level-of-detail rendering, and allows baking deeply layered material graphs into a compact unified neural representation. By exposing hardware accelerated tensor operations to ray tracing shaders, we show that it is possible to inline and execute the neural decoders efficiently inside a real-time path tracer. We analyze scalability with increasing number of neural materials and propose to improve performance using code optimized for coherent and divergent execution. Our neural material shaders can be over an order of magnitude faster than non-neural layered materials. This opens up the door for using film-quality visuals in real-time applications such as games and live previews. Tizian Zeltner, Fabrice Rousselle, Andrea Weidlich, Petrik Clarberg, Jan Novák, Benedikt Bitterli, Alex Evans, Tomás Davidovic, Simon Kallweit, Aaron E. Lefohn |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 7 |
| 2023 | Designing Multidimensional Blockchain Fee MarketsabstractPublic blockchains implement a fee mechanism to allocate scarce computational resources across competing transactions. Most existing fee market designs utilize a joint, fungible unit of account (e.g., gas in Ethereum) to price otherwise non-fungible resources such as bandwidth, computation, and storage, by hardcoding their relative prices. Fixing the relative price of each resource in this way inhibits granular price discovery, limiting scalability and opening up the possibility of denial-of-service attacks. As a result, many prominent networks such as Ethereum and Solana have proposed multi-dimensional fee markets. In this paper, we provide a principled way to design fee markets that efficiently price multiple non-fungible resources. Starting from a loss function specified by the network designer, we show how to compute dynamic prices that align the network's incentives (to minimize the loss) with those of the users and miners (to maximize their welfare), even as demand for these resources changes. Our pricing mechanism follows from a natural decomposition of the network designer's problem into two parts that are related to each other via the resource prices. These results can be used to efficiently set fees in order to improve network performance. Theo Diamandis, Alex Evans, Tarun Chitra, Guillermo Angeris |
AFT | 2 |
| 2023 | Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface ReconstructionabstractNeural surface reconstruction has been shown to be powerful for recovering dense 3D surfaces via image-based neural rendering. However, current methods struggle to recover detailed structures of real-world scenes. To address the issue, we present Neuralangelo, which combines the representation power of multiresolution 3D hash grids with neural surface rendering. Two key ingredients enable our approach: (1) numerical gradients for computing higher-order derivatives as a smoothing operation and (2) coarse-to-fine optimization on the hash grids controlling different levels of details. Even without auxiliary inputs such as depth, Neuralangelo can effectively recover dense 3D surface structures from multiview images with fidelity significantly surpassing previous methods, enabling detailed large-scale scene reconstruction from RGB video captures. Zhaoshuo Li, Thomas Müller 0013, Alex Evans, Russell H. Taylor, Mathias Unberath, Ming-Yu Liu 0001, Chen-Hsuan Lin 0001 |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2023 | BundleSDF: Neural 6-DoF Tracking and 3D Reconstruction of Unknown ObjectsabstractWe present a near real-time (10Hz) method for 6-DoF tracking of an unknown object from a monocular RGBD video sequence, while simultaneously performing neural 3D reconstruction of the object. Our method works for arbi-trary rigid objects, even when visual texture is largely ab-sent. The object is assumed to be segmented in the first frame only. No additional information is required, and no assumption is made about the interaction agent. Key to our method is a Neural Object Field that is learned concurrently with a pose graph optimization process in order to robustly accumulate information into a consistent 3D representation capturing both geometry and appearance. A dynamic pool of posed memory frames is automatically main-tained to facilitate communication between these threads. Our approach handles challenging sequences with large pose changes, partial and full occlusion, untextured surfaces, and specular highlights. We show results on HO3D, YCBInEOAT, and BEHAVE datasets, demonstrating that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches. Project page: https://bundlesdf.github.io/ Bowen Wen, Jonathan Tremblay, Valts Blukis, Stephen Tyree, Thomas Müller 0013, Alex Evans, Dieter Fox, Jan Kautz, Stanley T. Birchfield |
CVPR | 6 |
| 2023 | Parallel Inversion of Neural Radiance Fields for Robust Pose EstimationabstractWe present a parallelized optimization method based on fast Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) for estimating 6-DoF pose of a camera with respect to an object or scene. Given a single observed RGB image of the target, we can predict the translation and rotation of the camera by minimizing the residual between pixels rendered from a fast NeRF model and pixels in the observed image. We integrate a momentum-based camera extrinsic optimization procedure into Instant Neural Graphics Primitives, a recent exceptionally fast NeRF implementation. By introducing parallel Monte Carlo sampling into the pose estimation task, our method overcomes local minima and improves efficiency in a more extensive search space. We also show the importance of adopting a more robust pixel-based loss function to reduce error. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve improved generalization and robustness on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Yunzhi Lin, Thomas Müller 0013, Jonathan Tremblay, Bowen Wen, Stephen Tyree, Alex Evans, Patricio A. Vela, Stanley T. Birchfield |
ICRA | 6 |
| 2023 | Compact Neural Graphics Primitives with Learned Hash ProbingabstractNeural graphics primitives are faster and achieve higher quality when their neural networks are augmented by spatial data structures that hold trainable features arranged in a grid. However, existing feature grids either come with a large memory footprint (dense or factorized grids, trees, and hash tables) or slow performance (index learning and vector quantization). In this paper, we show that a hash table with learned probes has neither disadvantage, resulting in a favorable combination of size and speed. Inference is faster than unprobed hash tables at equal quality while training is only 1.2–2.6 × slower, significantly outperforming prior index learning approaches. We arrive at this formulation by casting all feature grids into a common framework: they each correspond to a lookup function that indexes into a table of feature vectors. In this framework, the lookup functions of existing data structures can be combined by simple arithmetic combinations of their indices, resulting in Pareto optimal compression and speed. Towaki Takikawa, Thomas Müller 0013, Merlin Nimier-David, Alex Evans, Sanja Fidler, Alec Jacobson, Alexander Keller 0001 |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 4 |
| 2022 | Extracting Triangular 3D Models, Materials, and Lighting From ImagesabstractWe present an efficient method for joint optimization of topology, materials and lighting from multi-view image observations. Unlike recent multi-view reconstruction approaches, which typically produce entangled 3D representations encoded in neural networks, we output triangle meshes with spatially-varying materials and environment lighting that can be deployed in any traditional graphics engine unmodified. We leverage recent work in differentiable rendering, coordinate-based networks to compactly represent volumetric texturing, alongside differentiable marching tetrahedrons to enable gradient-based optimization directly on the surface mesh. Finally, we introduce a differentiable formulation of the split sum approximation of environment lighting to efficiently recover all-frequency lighting. Experiments show our extracted models used in advanced scene editing, material decomposition, and high quality view interpolation, all running at interactive rates in triangle-based renderers (rasterizers and path tracers). Jacob Munkberg, Wenzheng Chen, Jon Hasselgren, Alex Evans, Tianchang Shen, Thomas Müller 0013, Jun Gao 0004, Sanja Fidler |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2022 | Optimal Routing for Constant Function Market MakersabstractWe consider the problem of optimally executing an order involving multiple crypto-assets, sometimes called tokens, on a network of multiple constant function market makers (CFMMs). When we ignore the fixed cost associated with executing an order on a CFMM, this optimal routing problem can be cast as a convex optimization problem, which is computationally tractable. When we include the fixed costs, the optimal routing problem is a mixed-integer convex problem, which can be solved using (sometimes slow) global optimization methods, or approximately solved using various heuristics based on convex optimization. The optimal routing problem includes as a special case the problem of identifying an arbitrage present in a network of CFMMs, or certifying that none exists. Guillermo Angeris, Alex Evans, Tarun Chitra, Stephen P. Boyd |
EC | 2 |
| 2022 | Instant neural graphics primitives with a multiresolution hash encodingabstractNeural graphics primitives, parameterized by fully connected neural networks, can be costly to train and evaluate. We reduce this cost with a versatile new input encoding that permits the use of a smaller network without sacrificing quality, thus significantly reducing the number of floating point and memory access operations: a small neural network is augmented by a multiresolution hash table of trainable feature vectors whose values are optimized through stochastic gradient descent. The multiresolution structure allows the network to disambiguate hash collisions, making for a simple architecture that is trivial to parallelize on modern GPUs. We leverage this parallelism by implementing the whole system using fully-fused CUDA kernels with a focus on minimizing wasted bandwidth and compute operations. We achieve a combined speedup of several orders of magnitude, enabling training of high-quality neural graphics primitives in a matter of seconds, and rendering in tens of milliseconds at a resolution of 1920×1080. Thomas Müller 0013, Alex Evans, Christoph Schied, Alexander Keller 0001 |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 2 |