PRIME-ANC: Path-Ratio-Informed Modeling for Efficient Neural Filter Synthesis in Active Noise Control

Changes in listener acoustics require active noise control (ANC) filters to be redesigned for new acoustic paths. We introduce PRIME-ANC, a shared neural synthesizer that learns a bounded, path-dependent logmagnitude correction to a regularized path-ratio base. Minimum-phase reconstruction and truncation produce finite-impulse-response (FIR) filters; training optimizes their noise-control performance. Across ten random training/test splits per dataset, PRIME-ANC achieves average held-out one-third-octave reductions of 18.81 and 17.76 dB over 50 Hz-5 kHz on a ten-path dataset and a public earphone database, respectively. On original earphone measurements, it improves upon the path-ratio base by 7.89 dB. Ablation studies support the contributions of both the analytic base and the path-dependent correction. Given calibrated paths for a held-out listener condition, PRIME-ANC generates a path-specific FIR without iterative optimization. With three Gauss-Newton updates, it reaches 21.43 dB reduction, approaching direct weighted least-squares design while producing lower amplification and root-mean-square control output.