Quantum and optical technology

Abstract:

Optical neural networks are emerging as a promising type of machine learning hardware capable of energy-efficient, parallel computation. Today’s optical neural networks are mainly developed to perform optical inference after in silico training on digital simulators. However, various physical imperfections that cannot be accurately modeled may lead to the notorious “reality gap” between the digital simulator and the physical system. To address this challenge, we demonstrate hybrid training of optical neural networks where the weight matrix is trained with neuron activation functions computed optically via forward propagation through the network. We examine the efficacy of hybrid training with three different networks: an optical linear classifier, a hybrid opto-electronic network, and a complex-valued optical network. We perform a study comparative to in silico training, and our results show that hybrid training is robust against different kinds of static noise. Our platform-agnostic hybrid training scheme can be applied to a wide variety of optical neural networks, and this work paves the way towards advanced all-optical training in machine intelligence.

Abstract:

Quantum inverse problem (QIP) is the problem of estimating an unknown quantum system from a set of measurements, whereas the classical counterpart is the inverse problem of estimating a distribution from a set of observations. In this paper, we present a neural-network-based method for QIPs, which has been widely explored for its classical counterpart. The proposed method utilizes the quantumness of the QIPs and takes advantage of the computational power of neural networks to achieve remarkable efficiency for the quantum state estimation. We test the method on the problem of maximum entropy estimation of an unknown state ρ from partial information both numerically and experimentally. Our method yields high fidelity, efficiency and robustness for both numerical experiments and quantum optical experiments.