The new research published in Optica took its inspiration from Nobel Prize laureate Ivan Pavlov’s discovery of classical conditioning. The repeated associations of two unrelated events paired together could produce a learned response – a conditional reflex. The AMLE inputs are paired with the correct outputs to supervise the learning process, and the memory material can be reset using light signals. ‘It is more efficient for problems that don’t need substantial analysis of highly complex features in the datasets’ said Professor Cheng. The full paper, ‘Monadic Pavlovian associative learning in a backpropagation-free photonic network,’ is available in the journal Optica.
