Will Accurate Fields Mislead Photonic Design? FromGlobal Accuracy to Port Readout
Yitian Zhang, Yonghong chen, Youming Chen, Yiyang Li, Xing Zhe, Renhe Lu, Shaolin Liao, Yuzhe Ma, Zhong Guan
Abstract
Neural field surrogates can accelerate photonic design loops, but a surrogate that looks accurate in global field error can still mis-rank candidate devices when the final decision depends on localized output-port readouts. This risk is acute in propagation-dominated MMI splitters and couplers, where port power, splitting, phase, and coupling are determined by accumulated modal interference and output-window aggregation rather than by average field similarity alone. We study this field-to-design mismatch through a Field/Mediator/Readout view that separates dense complex-field error from propagation-profile and output-window errors before port aggregation. To align the surrogate with this chain, we propose PaNO, a propagation-aligned neural operator that keeps the full-field prediction interface while organizing latent states around local boundary structure, transverse modal content, axial propagation, and cross-mode interaction. We also evaluate PaNO-R2, an output-aware feedback variant for residual field components near the port region. On a 15-wavelength tunable $3{\times}3$ MMI benchmark with 4608 held-out fields, PaNO lowers NeurOLight's port-power error from 0.2018 to 0.0739 despite slightly higher cMAE, showing that global field accuracy alone is not sufficient for design-relevant readout fidelity. PaNO-R2 attains the best cMAE, propagation-profile error, output-profile error, and port-power error, reducing NeurOLight's port-power and output-profile errors by 72.7\% and 72.5\%.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.