# Differentiable Ray Tracing with Gaussians for Unified Radio Propagation Simulation and View Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07781/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [MoGe-2: Accurate Monocular Geometry with Metric Scale and Sharp Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02546/) (2025)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [Relightable 3D Gaussians: Realistic Point Cloud Relighting with BRDF Decomposition and Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16043/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Ray Tracing: Fast Tracing of Particle Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07090/) (2024)
- [DN-Splatter: Depth and Normal Priors for Gaussian Splatting and Meshing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17822/) (2024)
- [StopThePop: Sorted Gaussian Splatting for View-Consistent Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00525/) (2024)
- [AbsGS: Recovering Fine Details for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10484/) (2024)
- [NeRF2: Neural Radio-Frequency Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06118/) (2023)
- [IRGS: Inter-Reflective Gaussian Splatting with 2D Gaussian Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15867/) (2024)
- [CityGaussianV2: Efficient and Geometrically Accurate Reconstruction for Large-Scale Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00771/) (2024)
- [EnvGS: Modeling View-Dependent Appearance with Environment Gaussian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15215/) (2024)
- [NeWRF: A Deep Learning Framework for Wireless Radiation Field Reconstruction and Channel Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03241/) (2024)
- [Learning Radio Environments by Differentiable Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18558/) (2023)
- [RF-3DGS: Wireless Channel Modeling with Radio Radiance Field and 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19420/) (2024)
- [GSRF: Complex-Valued 3D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Radio-Frequency Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01826/) (2025)
- [Learnable Wireless Digital Twins: Reconstructing Electromagnetic Field with Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02564/) (2024)
- [Differentiable High-Performance Ray Tracing-Based Simulation of Radio Propagation with Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04021/) (2025)
- [Radio Propagation Modelling: To Differentiate or To Deep Learn, That Is The Question](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19337/) (2025)
- [Ray-Optics Simulations of Outdoor-to-Indoor Multipath Channels at 4 and 14 GHz](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03159/) (2022)
- [Ray Launching-Based Computation of Exact Paths with Noisy Dense Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06648/) (2024)
- [BS3D: Building-scale 3D Reconstruction from RGB-D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01057/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Explicit neural representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable high-fidelity and real-time novel view synthesis, yet optimize for alpha-composited optical appearance rather than ray-intersectable geometry. In contrast, radio-frequency (RF) digital twins require deterministic multi-bounce paths, where the geometry dictates trajectories and their associated attenuation and delay. We introduce a framework enabling differentiable RF propagation simulation directly within visually reconstructed neural scenes, allowing point-to-point path computation between arbitrary 3D locations while preserving high-quality visual rendering. Unlike conventional RF simulation pipelines that rely on manually constructed meshes, we embed Gaussian primitives into a hardware-accelerated ray tracing structure as the underlying spatial representation. By extracting physically meaningful channel impulse responses from visual-only reconstructions, we provide cross-modal evidence that neural reconstructions can serve as unified spatial representations for both electromagnetic propagation simulation and photorealistic view synthesis.