Differentiable optics was developed by the KAUST Computational Imaging Group (https://vccimaging.org/). The first version of differentiable ray tracer was implemented by Dr. Congli Wang on Mitsuba2 in the following paper:
@article{sun2021end,
title={End-to-end complex lens design with differentiable ray tracing},
author={Sun, Qilin and Wang, Congli and Qiang, Fu and Xiong, Dun and Wolfgang, Heidrich},
journal={ACM Trans. Graph},
volume={40},
number={4},
pages={1--13},
year={2021}
}Later, Dr. Congli Wang implemented the first PyTorch version of differentiable ray tracer (dO) in the following paper:
@article{wang2022differentiable,
title={do: A differentiable engine for deep lens design of computational imaging systems},
author={Wang, Congli and Chen, Ni and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
journal={IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging},
volume={8},
pages={905--916},
year={2022},
publisher={IEEE}
}Currently, Xinge Yang is building and maintaining DeepLens. The automated lens design work demonstrates the outstanding capability of differentiable optics compared to classical optical design in the following paper:
@article{yang2024curriculum,
title={Curriculum learning for ab initio deep learned refractive optics},
author={Yang, Xinge and Fu, Qiang and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
journal={Nature communications},
volume={15},
number={1},
pages={6572},
year={2024},
publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
}A differentiable ray-wave model is introduced for simulating and optimizing hybrid refractive-diffractive lenses in the following paper:
@inproceedings{yang2024end,
title={End-to-end hybrid refractive-diffractive lens design with differentiable ray-wave model},
author={Yang, Xinge and Souza, Matheus and Wang, Kunyi and Chakravarthula, Praneeth and Fu, Qiang and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
booktitle={SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Conference Papers},
pages={1--11},
year={2024}
}Differentiable non-sequential ray tracing and polarization tracing are developed in the following paper:
@article{yang2026waveguide,
title={End-to-end differentiable design of geometric waveguide displays},
author={Yang, Xinge and Liu, Zhaocheng and Nie, Zhaoyu and Fan, Qingyuan and Shi, Zhimin and Bonar, Jim and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.04370},
year={2026}
}