Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2603.02205

Analytical Exploration of Spatial Audio Cues: A Differentiable Multi-Sphere Scattering Model

Siminfar Samakoush Galougah·Pranav Pulijala·Ramani Duraiswami
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

A primary challenge in developing synthetic spatial hearing systems, particularly underwater, is accurately modeling sound scattering. Biological organisms achieve 3D spatial hearing by exploiting sound scattering off their bodies to generate location-dependent interaural level and time differences (ITD/ILD). While Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) models based on rigid scattering suffice for terrestrial humans, they fail in underwater environments due to the near-impedance match between water and soft tissue. Motivated by the acoustic anatomy of underwater animals, we introduce a novel, analytically derived, closed-form forward model for scattering from a semi-transparent sphere containing two rigid spherical scatterers. This model accurately maps source direction, frequency, and material properties to the pressure field, capturing the complex physics of layered, penetrable structures. Critically, our model is implemented in a fully differentiable setting, enabling its integration with a machine learning algorithm to optimize a cost function for active localization. We demonstrate enhanced convergence for localization under noise using a physics-informed frequency weighting scheme, and present accurate moving-source tracking via an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) with analytically computed Jacobians. Our work suggests that differentiable models of scattering from layered rigid and transparent geometries offer a promising new foundation for microphone arrays that leverage scattering-based spatial cues over conventional beamforming, applicable to both terrestrial and underwater applications. Our model will be made open source.

Explore related subjects

cs.SD

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Siminfar Samakoush Galougah, Pranav Pulijala, Ramani Duraiswami. 2026-03-02. Analytical Exploration of Spatial Audio Cues: A Differentiable Multi-Sphere Scattering Model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02205

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs

Audio large language models (AudioLLMs) enable instruction following over speech and general audio, but progress is limited by the scarcity of diverse, conversational, and instruction-aligned speech--text data. This gap is particularly pronounced for persona-grounded and dialectal interactions, where collecting real multi-speaker recordings remains costly and slow. We introduce MENASpeechBank, a reference speech bank comprising ~18K high-quality utterances from 124 speakers spanning multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and regional Arabic varieties. We develop a controllable data pipeline that (i) constructs persona profiles enriched with World Values Survey (WVS) inspired attributes, (ii) defines a taxonomy driven ~5Kconversational scenarios, (iii) matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, (iv) generates ~417K role-play conversations with an LLM where the user speaks as the persona and the assistant behaves as a helpful agent, and (v) produces speaker-conditioned user-turn audio (synthetic) from reference recordings to preserve speaker diversity. We evaluate synthetic and human recorded conversations and provide an analysis. We will make the MENASpeechBank available for the community.(\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/MenaSpeechBank)

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

A Training-Free Proactive Defense Against Partial Speech Manipulation via Self-Embedding Steganography

Partial deepfake speech, where only limited segments of an utterance are synthesized or manipulated, poses a significant challenge to existing deepfake detection systems. As the proportion of spoofed regions decreases, passive detectors become increasingly unreliable, and accurate detection and restoration remain challenging. In this paper, we revisit audio steganography from a new perspective and propose its use as a proactive defense against partially deepfaked audio. In particular, we consider a self-embedding strategy in which a clean speech signal embeds a compressed representation of itself, enabling post-hoc extraction of reference content. We demonstrate how existing audio steganography methods can be repurposed to support detection of partial deepfakes through codec-based restoration. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show that the proposed approach complements passive defenses. Remarkably, the proposed method operates without any training, providing a robust and data-efficient alternative for partial deepfake detection.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

CPR: Combining global composing, local performing and full-sequence refining in piano rendering with continuous autoregressive modelling

Prompt-conditioned piano MIDI-to-Music rendering aims to faithfully render target notes while reproducing the timbre of a reference recording. Existing approaches primarily follow two paradigms: autoregressive (AR) modeling and flow matching (or diffusion). Discrete-codec AR models provide causal temporal modeling, but quantization can discard acoustic detail. Flow matching better preserves acoustic structure in the cost of full-sequence attention costs and worse semantic structure. Continuous autoregressive models operate directly on continuous representations. It not only combines the condition-following ability of AR models and distribution-modeling capacity of flow matching but also bypasses the quantization bottleneck with lower computational costs. Building on this principle, we present Composer--Performer--Refiner (CPR) framework. Composer autoregressively predicts continuous hidden states, Performer generates 24kHz acoustic latents through local flow matching and Refiner then upsamples the waveform to 48 kHz. We further introduce Bottlenecked Representation Alignment (BREPA) and Modality--Time RoPE (MT-RoPE) to strengthen musical semantic structure in Composer hidden states and temporal alignments across modalities. Codes are available at https://github.com/FEAfeatherTHER/CPR_official

cs.SD↗