Optical Architecture for Simulated Annealing: A Novel Approach

Researchers have devised an optical architecture for simulated annealing, employing microLED arrays, liquid-crystal spatial light modulators, and photodetector arrays to perform matrix-vector multiplication. This system efficiently handles machine learning and optimization problems, leveraging a simulated tanh nonlinearity for efficient solving. Experiments demonstrate high-accuracy classification on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, and superior performance on various optimization problems, offering a novel hardware solution for large-scale simulated annealing computation.