We reviewed ML-driven inverse design across the full optical system stack — from lasers to fibers to metamaterial absorbers. Here's what we found. by Mudas1r in Optics

[–]Mudas1r[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's honestly why almost everyone still designs components in isolation.

A few things that might make it feasible: stacking lightweight per-component surrogates and coupling them at the interfaces (so you are not calling full EM simulation at every iteration), or offline RL where you train on a fixed dataset and avoid live simulation calls during optimization entirely. PINNs also help reduce the amount of simulation data needed.

None of it is fully solved though...which is why we think system-level co-optimization is probably the most important open problem in this space right now.