Application of Reconfigurable All-Optical Activation Unit based on Optical Injection into Bistable Fabry-Pérot Laser in Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks

Abstract: In this paper we theoretically investigate application of a bistable Fabry-P\'{e}rot semiconductor laser under optical-injection as all-optical activation unit for multilayer perceptron optical neural networks. The proposed device is programmed to provide reconfigurable sigmoid-like activation functions with adjustable thresholds and saturation points and benchmarked on machine learning image recognition problems. Due to the reconfigurability of the activation unit, the accuracy can be increased by up to 2% simply by adjusting the control parameter of the activation unit to suit the specific problem. For a simple two-layer perceptron neural network, we achieve inference accuracies of up to 95% and 85%, for the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, respectively.