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routineML Systems & EfficiencyEquilibrium Propagation2606.13454

Optical Implementation of Equilibrium Propagation Using Spatial Photonic Ising Machines

Dimitri Vanden Abeele, Daniele Veraldi, Davide Pierangeli, Claudio Conti, Serge Massar

physics.optics cond-mat.dis-nn cs.ET cs.LG

Abstract

Equilibrium Propagation offers a compelling alternative to traditional machine learning for training energy-based networks. Here we demonstrate a hybrid optical-digital implementation of EP using a Spatial Photonic Ising Machine (SPIM). The SPIM exploits the gauge transformation method to optically encode both continuous neuron states and rank-1 binary trainable patterns as phase modulations via a spatial light modulator, with inference realized using a finite difference scheme. The experimental system is evaluated on the Wine classification dataset. The potential of this approach, including the use of continuous couplings and structured coupling matrices, is evaluated numerically on the more complex MNIST dataset. Our work provides a concrete pathway toward energy-efficient physical implementations of Equilibrium Propagation.

Topics

Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.

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