A high speed fully trainable laser-based neural network

We experimentally demonstrate an autonomous, fully tunable and scalable optical neural network of 400+ parallel nodes based on a large area, multimode semiconductor laser. We implement hardware compatible, online learning strategies based on reinforcement learning and evolutionary strategies and evaluate them in terms of performance and energy cost. Our system achieves high performance and a high classification bandwidth of 15KHz for the MNIST dataset. Our approach is highly scalable both in terms of classification bandwidth and neural network size due to our device's short response time (nanosecond).