Direction-Aware Neural Acoustic Fields for Few-Shot Interpolation of Ambisonic Impulse Responses

The characteristics of a sound field are intrinsically linked to the geometric and spatial properties of the environment surrounding a sound source and a listener. The physics of sound propagation is captured in a time-domain signal known as a room impulse response (RIR). Prior work using neural fields (NFs) has allowed learning spatially-continuous representations of RIRs from finite RIR measurements. However, previous NF-based methods have focused on monaural omnidirectional or at most binaural listeners, which does not precisely capture the directional characteristics of a real sound field at a single point. We propose a direction-aware neural field (DANF) that more explicitly incorporates the directional information by Ambisonic-format RIRs. While DANF inherently captures spatial relations between sources and listeners, we further propose a direction-aware loss. In addition, we investigate the ability of DANF to adapt to new rooms in various ways including low-rank adaptation.

@article{ick2025_2505.13617,
  title={ Direction-Aware Neural Acoustic Fields for Few-Shot Interpolation of Ambisonic Impulse Responses },
  author={ Christopher Ick and Gordon Wichern and Yoshiki Masuyama and François Germain and Jonathan Le Roux },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13617},
  year={ 2025 }
}