Optically accelerated extreme learning machine using hot atomic vapors

Machine learning is becoming a widely used technique with impressive growth due to the diversity of problems of societal interest for which it can offer practical solutions. This increase of applications and required resources start to become limited by present-day hardware technologies. Indeed, novel machine learning subjects such as large language models or high-resolution image recognition raise the question of large computing time and energy cost of the required computation. In this context, optical platforms have been designed for several years with the goal of developing more efficient hardware for machine learning. Among different explored platforms, optical free-space propagation offers various advantages: parallelism, low energy cost, and computational speed. Here, we present a new design combining the strong and tunable nonlinear properties of a light beam propagating through a hot atomic vapor with an extreme learning machine model. We numerically and experimentally demonstrate the enhancement of the training using such free-space nonlinear propagation on an MNIST image classification task. We point out different experimental hyperparameters that can be further optimized to improve the accuracy of the platform.