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We show that these MIS heuristics are oblivious to the effect of certain variance reduction techniques like stratification. This shortcoming is particularly pronounced when unstratified and stratified techniques are combined (e.g., in a bidirectional path tracer). We propose to enhance the balance heuristic by injecting variance estimates of individual techniques, to reduce the variance of the combined estimator in such cases. Our method is simple to implement and introduces little overhead.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3355089.3356515","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,11,8]],"date-time":"2019-11-08T20:27:58Z","timestamp":1573244878000},"page":"1-9","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":19,"title":["Variance-aware multiple importance sampling"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"38","author":[{"given":"Pascal","family":"Grittmann","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Saarland University, Germany"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Iliyan","family":"Georgiev","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Autodesk, United Kingdom"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Philipp","family":"Slusallek","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"DFKI and Saarland University, Germany"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jaroslav","family":"K\u0159iv\u00e1nek","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Charles University and Chaos Czech a. s., Czech Republic"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,11,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_2_1_1","unstructured":"Benedikt Bitterli. 2016. 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