Photonic Computing

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Overview

Photonic computing studies how optical components such as interferometers, diffractive layers, resonators, and lasers can perform operations used in machine learning and optimization. Approaches include photonic tensor cores for neural-network and transformer workloads, passive diffractive processors, and reservoir computers that use a device’s physical dynamics; quantum photonic methods also explore learning and optimization with photon-based states. These systems are tested on tasks ranging from image and speech recognition to forecasting, classification, and combinatorial optimization, with energy, throughput, and accuracy compared against electronic baselines. A central challenge is turning optical speed or energy advantages into reliable end-to-end gains despite noise, limited memory and readout, encoding and precision costs, and constraints in scaling and calibrating hardware.

Latest papers

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47 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, up 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. OptiLookUp: An Optical ROM-Based Lookup Table Engine for Photonic Accelerators

    May 5, 2026Ankur Singh, Akhilesh JaiswalNeural Network Activation FunctionsInference Acceleration

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

  2. Towards Topology-Aware Very Large-Scale Photonic AI Accelerators

    Apr 16, 2026Belal Jahannia, Abdolah Amirany, Hamed DalirEfficient Neural Network InferencePhotonic Computing

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

  3. Analog Optical Inference on Million-Record Mortgage Data

    Apr 14, 2026Sofia Berloff, Pavel Koptev, Konstantin MalkovAnalog ComputingPhotonic Computing

    Department of Mathematics, University of York, York, UK · ai1Technologies, 27 Beach Rd Suite 5A Monmouth Beach, NJ 07750, USA

  4. Photonic AI: A Hybrid Diffractive Holographic Neural System for Passive Optical Real-Time Image Classification

    Apr 14, 2026Prakul Sunil HiremathDiffractive Neural NetworksPhotonic Computing

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Belagavi, India · Aliens on Earth (AoE) Autonomous Research Group, Belagavi, India

  5. Harnessing Photonics for Machine Intelligence

    Apr 12, 2026Hanqing Zhu, Shupeng Ning, Hongjian Zhou +4Photonic ComputingAI Accelerator Inference

    The University of Texas at Austin · Arizona State University

  6. Integrated electro-optic attention nonlinearities for transformers

    Apr 10, 2026Luis Mickeler, Kai Lion, Alfonso Nardi +5Transformer InferencePhotonic Computing

    Optical Nanomaterial Group, Department of Physics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Optimization & Decision Intelligence Group, Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy +1

  7. Sustainable Transformer Neural Network Acceleration with Stochastic Photonic Computing

    Apr 10, 2026S. Afifi, O. Alo, I. Thakkar +1Efficient Transformer InferenceTransformer Inference

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

  8. Small-scale photonic Kolmogorov-Arnold networks using standard telecom nonlinear modules

    Apr 9, 2026Luca Nogueira Calçado, Sergei K. Turitsyn, Egor ManuylovichPhotonic ComputingKolmogorov-Arnold Networks

    Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies (AiPT), Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET, United Kingdom.

  9. Photonic convolutional neural network with pre-trained in situ training

    Apr 2, 2026Saurabh Ranjan, Sonika Thakral, Amit SehgalPhotonic ComputingEfficient Neural Network Inference

    Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies, University of Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi 110085 · Hansraj College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi 110007

  10. Large-scale nonlinear optical computing with incoherent light via linear diffractive systems

    Mar 31, 2026Alexander Chen, Yuntian Wang, Md Sadman Sakib Rahman +2Photonic Computing

    Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA · Bioengineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA · California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

  11. OptINC: Optical In-Network-Computing for Scalable Distributed Learning

    Mar 30, 2026Sijie Fei, Grace Li Zhang, Bing Li +1Gradient QuantizationCommunication-Efficient Distributed Training

    Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany · Technical University of Ilmenau, Ilmenau, Germany

  12. PRISM: Breaking the O(n) Memory Wall in Long-Context LLM Inference via O(1) Photonic Block Selection

    Mar 23, 2026Hyoseok Park, Yeonsang ParkLLM Inference AccelerationLong-Context LLM Inference

    Department of Physics, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Republic of Korea

  13. Compressive single-pixel imaging via a wavelength-multiplexed spatially incoherent diffractive optical processor

    Mar 23, 2026Xiao Wang, Yiyang Wu, Yuntian Wang +8Computational ImagingPhotonic Computing

    Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA · Bioengineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA · California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

  14. Photonic Quantum-Enhanced Knowledge Distillation

    Mar 16, 2026Kuan-Cheng Chen, Shang Yu, Chen-Yu Liu +10Knowledge DistillationQuantum Machine Learning

    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington, London, SW7 2AZ, England, United Kingdom. · Imperial Centre for Quantum Engineering, Science and Technology, Imperial College London, South Kensington, London, SW7 2AZ, England, United Kingdom. · JIJ, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Campus, Didcot, OX11 0QX, United Kingdom. +9

  15. Noise Models Impacts and Mitigation Strategies in Photonic Quantum Machine Learning

    Mar 10, 2026A. M. A. S. D. Alagiyawanna, Asoka KarunanandaQuantum Machine LearningPhotonic Computing

    Department of Computational Mathematics, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

  16. Accelerating Diffusion Models for Generative AI Applications with Silicon Photonics

    Mar 8, 2026Tharini Suresh, Salma Afifi, Sudeep PasrichaDiffusion Model Inference AccelerationDiffusion Models

    Electrical and Computer Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA

  17. ReDON: Recurrent Diffractive Optical Neural Processor with Reconfigurable Self-Modulated Nonlinearity

    Feb 27, 2026Ziang Yin, Qi Jing, Raktim Sarma +3Diffractive Neural NetworksPhotonic Computing

    Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA · Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA · Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA