General-Purpose Photonic Computing Primitive for Contemporary Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Photonic computing offers a promising route to accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) by providing high analog bandwidth, low latency, and low energy consumption. However, existing optical neural networks (ONNs) struggle with substantial hardware overhead and limited support for the dynamic, arbitrary matrix operations essential for modern AI architectures. Here we present the dynamic universal encoding tensorcore (DUET), a general-purpose photonic computing paradigm based on vectorized operand differential interferometric cells (VODICs). By exploiting inherent structural symmetry, this design provides a full-range linear encoding interface that directly accommodates signed operands. This approach eliminates the sign-based path splitting, nonlinear remapping, and auxiliary preprocessing typically required in conventional ONNs, thereby reducing latency and minimizing hardware and memory overhead. We further implement a hardware-aware training (HAT) strategy to alleviate the impact of on-chip non-idealities and ensure stable inference. DUET is experimentally validated across diverse architectures and application domains, ranging from image classification and medical segmentation to Transformer-based content generation, demonstrating competitive performance. By extending optical computing to universal, full-range operators across diverse model architectures, DUET provides a viable pathway toward general-purpose optical acceleration for contemporary AI workloads.