Resounding Acoustic Fields with Reciprocity

Zitong Lan, Yiduo Hao, Mingmin Zhao
University of Pennsylvania  

NeurIPS'25

Paper Code

TL;DR: We propose Versa, a reciprocity-guided framework for resounding. Versa leverages physical wave symmetry to learn physically consistent acoustic fields even with sparse emitters.

Project Presentation

A quick overview of the key idea: acoustic reciprocity as supervision for learning physically consistent acoustic fields under sparse emitter configurations.

Method

Versa turns reciprocity into supervision: swapping emitter ↔ listener provides physically grounded training signals to improve generalization when emitter coverage is sparse.

Versa method overview figure
Reciprocity principle.In vision, reciprocity says the light can travel reversely. Similarly in acoustic, swapping emitter and listener positions leaves the acoustic response unchanged.

Problem (Resounding). We want to synthesize impulse responses at new source positions, even when only a few emitters are observed during training. Naïvely training on sparse emitters often leads to physically inconsistent fields and poor generalization.

Key insight: Acoustic reciprocity. The propagation path is symmetric under swapping emitter and listener. This symmetry lets us “relabel” dense microphones as virtual emitters and generate additional supervisory signals.

Versa-ELE: Emitter–Listener Exchange

Create physically valid virtual emitters by swapping emitter and listener poses. This transforms sparse emitter coverage into denser supervision for training.

Versa-ELE figure
Versa-ELE. Exchange emitter and listener poses to generate physically consistent pseudo-labels.

Versa-SSL: Reciprocity Self-Supervision

When emitter/listener gain patterns break naïve symmetry, Versa-SSL aligns gain effects and enforces reciprocity consistency, enabling stable learning under real hardware differences.

Versa-SSL figure
Versa-SSL. Reciprocity-based self-supervision that remains valid under asymmetric gain patterns.

Demos

Compare Vanilla, Versa (Ours), and GT side-by-side. Use the toggle to switch Ours between ELE and SSL when available.

Ours variant:
Vanilla
Ours
GT

BibTeX


      @inproceedings{lanresounding,
        title={Resounding Acoustic Fields with Reciprocity},
        author={Lan, Zitong and Hao, Yiduo and Zhao, Mingmin},
        booktitle={The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems}
      }