Hybrid supervised and reinforcement learning for the design and optimization of nanophotonic structures

From higher computational efficiency to enabling the discovery of novel and complex structures, deep learning has emerged as a powerful framework for the design and optimization of nanophotonic circuits and components. However, both data-driven and exploration-based machine learning strategies have limitations in their effectiveness for nanophotonic inverse design. Supervised machine learning approaches require large quantities of training data to produce high-performance models and have difficulty generalizing beyond training data given the complexity of the design space. Unsupervised and reinforcement learning-based approaches on the other hand can have very lengthy training or optimization times associated with them. Here we demonstrate a hybrid supervised learning and reinforcement learning approach to the inverse design of nanophotonic structures and show this approach can reduce training data dependence, improve the generalizability of model predictions, and significantly shorten exploratory training times. The presented strategy thus addresses several contemporary deep learning-based challenges, while opening the door for new design methodologies that leverage multiple classes of machine learning algorithms to produce more effective and practical solutions for photonic design.