What Sound Tells You About the Room

A room impulse response (RIR) encodes how sound reflects, scatters, and decays inside a room, and therefore what the room looks like and what it is made of. We formalize this observation as Acoustic Inverse Rendering (AIR): recovering dense panoramic geometry and per-band acoustic reflectance of a scene directly from its RIR. The task is challenging as the RIR collapses all propagation paths into a single temporal signal, and the resulting inverse mapping is severely ambiguous. AIR closes this gap by beamforming the RIR onto the equirectangular grid and conditioning a diffusion model on the resulting directional features, yielding a distribution over plausible scenes rather than a single point estimate. The same spherical beamforming applies to FOA, binaural, or mono microphone setups. On both simulated and real-world datasets, AIR produces coherent room geometry and per-band acoustic reflectance maps from acoustic input alone, significantly outperforming prior baselines on this inverse problem.