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Physics-aware Complex-valued Adversarial Machine Learning in Reconfigurable Diffractive All-optical Neural Network

Diffractive optical neural networks have shown promising advantages over electronic circuits for accelerating modern machine learning (ML) algorithms. However, it is challenging to achieve fully programmable all-optical implementation and rapid hardware deployment. Furthermore, understanding the threat of adversarial ML in such system becomes crucial for real-world applications, which remains unexplored. Here, we demonstrate a large-scale, cost-effective, complex-valued, and reconfigurable diffractive all-optical neural networks system in the visible range based on cascaded transmissive twisted nematic liquid crystal spatial light modulators. With the assist of categorical reparameterization, we create a physics-aware training framework for the fast and accurate deployment of computer-trained models onto optical hardware. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze and experimentally demonstrate physics-aware adversarial attacks onto the system, which are generated from a complex-valued gradient-based algorithm. The detailed adversarial robustness comparison with conventional multiple layer perceptrons and convolutional neural networks features a distinct statistical adversarial property in diffractive optical neural networks. Our full stack of software and hardware provides new opportunities of employing diffractive optics in a variety of ML tasks and enabling the research on optical adversarial ML.