TR2026-007

RANF: Neural Field-Based HRTF Spatial Upsampling with Retrieval Augmentation and Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning


    •  Masuyama, Y., Wichern, G., Germain, F.G., Ick, C., Le Roux, J., "RANF: Neural Field-Based HRTF Spatial Upsampling with Retrieval Augmentation and Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning", IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, December 2025.
      BibTeX TR2026-007 PDF Software
      • @article{Masuyama2025dec,
      • author = {Masuyama, Yoshiki and Wichern, Gordon and Germain, François G and Ick, Christopher and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
      • title = {{RANF: Neural Field-Based HRTF Spatial Upsampling with Retrieval Augmentation and Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning}},
      • journal = {IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = dec,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-007}
      • }
  • MERL Contacts:
  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio

Abstract:

This paper gives an in-depth description of our submission to Task 2 of the Listener Acoustic Personalization (LAP) challenge 2024, which aims to reconstruct head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) with dense spatial grids from sparse measurements. Neural fields (NFs) with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) have led to dramatic performance improvements in HRTF spatial upsampling and personalization. Despite these advances, spatial upsampling performance remains limited in scenarios with very sparse measurements. Our proposed system, named retrieval-augmented NF (RANF), incorporates HRTFs retrieved from a dataset as auxiliary inputs. We leverage multiple retrievals via transform-average- concatenate and adopt a PEFT technique tailored for retrieval augmentation. Furthermore, we capitalize on the results of a signal-processing-based spatial upsampling method as optional inputs. By incorporating these auxiliary inputs, our system demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on the SONICOM dataset and placed first in Task 2 of the LAP challenge 2024.

 

  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Related Publications

  •  Masuyama, Y., Wichern, G., Germain, F.G., Ick, C., Le Roux, J., "Retrieval-Augmented Neural Field for HRTF Upsampling and Personalization", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), DOI: 10.1109/​ICASSP49660.2025.10889481, April 2025.
    BibTeX TR2025-029 PDF Software
    • @inproceedings{Masuyama2025mar,
    • author = {{{Masuyama, Yoshiki and Wichern, Gordon and Germain, François G and Ick, Christopher and Le Roux, Jonathan}}},
    • title = {{{Retrieval-Augmented Neural Field for HRTF Upsampling and Personalization}}},
    • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
    • year = 2025,
    • month = apr,
    • doi = {10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10889481},
    • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-029}
    • }
  •  Masuyama, Y., Wichern, G., Germain, F.G., Ick, C., Le Roux, J., "Retrieval-Augmented Neural Field for HRTF Upsampling and Personalization", arXiv, January 2025.
    BibTeX arXiv
    • @article{Masuyama2025jan,
    • author = {Masuyama, Yoshiki and Wichern, Gordon and Germain, François G and Ick, Christopher and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
    • title = {{Retrieval-Augmented Neural Field for HRTF Upsampling and Personalization}},
    • journal = {arXiv},
    • year = 2025,
    • month = jan,
    • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13017}
    • }