An optical neural network using less than 1 photon per multiplication.

Deep learning has become a widespread tool in both science and industry. However, continued progress is hampered by the rapid growth in energy costs of ever-larger deep neural networks. Optical neural networks provide a potential means to solve the energy-cost problem faced by deep learning. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an optical neural network based on optical dot products that achieves 99% accuracy on handwritten-digit classification using 3.1 detected photons per weight multiplication and ~90% accuracy using ~0.66 photons (2.5 × 10 J of optical energy) per weight multiplication. The fundamental principle enabling our sub-photon-per-multiplication demonstration-noise reduction from the accumulation of scalar multiplications in dot-product sums-is applicable to many different optical-neural-network architectures. Our work shows that optical neural networks can achieve accurate results using extremely low optical energies.