On-chip bacterial foraging training in silicon photonic circuits for projection-enabled nonlinear classification

On-chip training remains a challenging issue for photonic devices to implement machine learning algorithms. Most demonstrations only implement inference in photonics for offline-trained neural network models. On the other hand, artificial neural networks are one of the most deployed algorithms, while other machine learning algorithms such as supporting vector machine (SVM) remain unexplored in photonics. Here, inspired by SVM, we propose to implement projection-based classification principle by constructing nonlinear mapping functions in silicon photonic circuits and experimentally demonstrate on-chip bacterial foraging training for this principle to realize single Boolean logics, combinational Boolean logics, and Iris classification with ~96.7 − 98.3 per cent accuracy. This approach can offer comparable performances to artificial neural networks for various benchmarks even with smaller scales and without leveraging traditional activation functions, showing scalability advantage. Natural-intelligence-inspired bacterial foraging offers efficient and robust on-chip training, and this work paves a way for photonic circuits to perform nonlinear classification. On-chip training of machine learning algorithms is challenging for photonic devices. Here, the authors construct nonlinear mapping functions in silicon photonic circuits, and experimentally demonstrate on-chip bacterial foraging training for projection-based classification.