Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates
Organizations: School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, United Kingdom · Department of Physics, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA · 3Physics Doctoral Program, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA · 4Chemistry Doctoral Program, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA
Abstract
Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.