Scalable Optical Learning Operator

Today’s heavy machine learning tasks are fueled by large datasets. Computing is performed with power-hungry processors whose performance is ultimately limited by the data transfer to and from memory. Optics is a powerful means of communicating and processing information, and there is currently intense interest in optical information processing for realizing high-speed computations. Here we present and experimentally demonstrate an optical computing framework called scalable optical learning operator, which is based on spatiotemporal effects in multimode fibers for a range of learning tasks including classifying COVID-19 X-ray lung images, speech recognition and predicting age from images of faces. The presented framework addresses the energy scaling problem of existing systems without compromising speed. We leverage simultaneous, linear and nonlinear interaction of spatial modes as a computation engine. We numerically and experimentally show the ability of the method to execute several different tasks with accuracy comparable with a digital implementation. Optical computing promises high-speed computations but presents challenges in nonlinear information processing. This Article demonstrates a scalable and energy-efficient nonlinear optical-computing framework that can perform machine learning tasks.