People

Timo Aila

Timo Aila joined NVIDIA Research in 2007 from Helsinki University of Technology, where he led the computer graphics research group. His expertise ranges from real-time rendering in computer games to to high-quality image synthesis, with contributions to the PantaRay rendering system used in Avatar, Tintin, and Hobbit. He also gained expertise in mobile graphics as the chief scientist of Hybrid Graphics, which was acquired by NVIDIA in 2006. Timo is currently working on machine learning, with a special focus on generative models such as StyleGAN. Previously he had a central role in NVIDIA's research efforts on ray tracing, including the design of the RTX hardware units.

Research Area(s)
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Computer Graphics
Computer Vision
Generative AI
Main Field of Interest
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Google Scholar
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=e7abmgkAAAAJ

Publications

2022

Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models
Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine
NeurIPS 2022 (oral)
NeurIPS Outstanding Paper

2021

Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks
Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Samuli Laine, Erik Härkönen, Janne Hellsten, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
NeurIPS 2021

2020

Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data
Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Janne Hellsten, Samuli Laine, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
NeurIPS 2020
Modular Primitives for High-Performance Differentiable Rendering
Samuli Laine, Janne Hellsten, Tero Karras, Yeongho Seol, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
ACM Transactions on Graphics 39(6) (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia 2020)
Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN
Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Miika Aittala, Janne Hellsten, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
CVPR 2020

2019

Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models
Tuomas Kynkäänniemi, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
NeurIPS 2019
High-Quality Self-Supervised Deep Image Denoising
Samuli Laine, Tero Karras, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
NeurIPS 2019
Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation
Ming-Yu Liu, Xun Huang, Arun Mallya, Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Jaakko Lehtinen, Jan Kautz
ICCV
A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Timo Aila
IEEE CVPR 2019

2018

Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data
Jaakko Lehtinen, Jacob Munkberg, Jon Hasselgren, Samuli Laine, Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Timo Aila
Proc. ICML 2018
Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation
Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine, Jaakko Lehtinen
ICLR 2018

2017

Audio-Driven Facial Animation by Joint End-to-End Learning of Pose and Emotion
Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine, Antti Herva, Jaakko Lehtinen
SIGGRAPH 2017
Production-Level Facial Performance Capture Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Samuli Laine, Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Antti Herva, Shunsuke Saito, Ronald Yu, Hao Li, Jaakko Lehtinen
Symposium on Computer Animation 2017
Reconstructing Intensity Images from Binary Spatial Gradient Cameras
Suren Jayasuriya, Orazio Gallo, Jinwei Gu, Timo Aila, Jan Kautz
IEEE Workshop on Embedded Vision (CVPR)
Interactive Reconstruction of Monte Carlo Image Sequences using a Recurrent Denoising Autoencoder
Chakravarty R. Alla Chaitanya, Anton Kaplanyan, Christoph Schied, Marco Salvi, Aaron Lefohn, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Timo Aila
SIGGRAPH 2017
Pruning Convolutional Neural Networks for Resource Efficient Inference
Pavlo Molchanov, Stephen Tyree, Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Jan Kautz
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2017)

2016

Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning
Samuli Laine, Timo Aila
ICLR 2017
Reflectance Modeling by Neural Texture Synthesis
Miika Aittala, Timo Aila, Jaakko Lehtinen
ACM Transactions on Graphics 35(4) (proc. SIGGRAPH 2016)

2013

On Quality Metrics of Bounding Volume Hierarchies
Timo Aila, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine
Proc. High-Performance Graphics
Megakernels Considered Harmful: Wavefront Path Tracing on GPUs
Samuli Laine, Tero Karras, Timo Aila
High-Performance Graphics 2013
Fast Parallel Construction of High-Quality Bounding Volume Hierarchies
Tero Karras, Timo Aila
High Performance Graphics 2013
Gradient-Domain Metropolis Light Transport
Jaakko Lehtinen, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Miika Aittala, Frédo Durand, Timo Aila
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2013)

2012

Reconstructing the Indirect Light Field for Global Illumination
Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine, Frédo Durand
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2012)
Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Traversal on GPUs - Kepler and Fermi Addendum
Timo Aila, Samuli Laine, Tero Karras
NVIDIA Technical Report NVR-2012-002

2011

Temporal Light Field Reconstruction for Rendering Distribution Effects
Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila, Jiawen Chen, Samuli Laine, Frédo Durand
ACM Transactions in Graphics 30(4) (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2011)
Clipless Dual-Space Bounds for Faster Stochastic Rasterization
Samuli Laine, Timo Aila, Tero Karras, Jaakko Lehtinen
ACM Transactions in Graphics 30(4) (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2011)
A Local Image Reconstruction Algorithm for Stochastic Rendering
Peter Shirley, Timo Aila, Jonathan Cohen, Eric Enderton, Samuli Laine, David Luebke, Morgan McGuire
i3D

2010

Architecture Considerations for Tracing Incoherent Rays
Timo Aila, Tero Karras
Proc. High-Performance Graphics 2010

2009

Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Traversal on GPUs
Timo Aila, Samuli Laine
Proc. High-Performance Graphics

2008

A Meshless Hierarchical Representation for Light Transport
Jaakko Lehtinen, Matthias Zwicker, Emmanuel Turquin, Janne Kontkanen, François Sillion, Fredo Durand, Timo Aila
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH)

2007

A Hardware Architecture for Surface Splatting
Tim Weyrich, Simon Heinzle, Timo Aila, Daniel B. Fasnacht, Stephan Oetiker, Mario Botsch, Cyril Flaig, Simon Mall, Kaspar Rohrer, Norbert Felber, Hubert Kaeslin, Markus Gross
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH)
Incremental Instant Radiosity for Real-Time Indirect Illumination
Samuli Laine, Hannu Saransaari, Janne Kontkanen, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
Eurographics Symposium on Rendering