A data-efficient self-supervised deep learning model for design and characterization of nanophotonic structures

With its tremendous success in many machine learning and pattern recognition tasks, deep learning, as one type of data-driven models, has also led to many breakthroughs in other disciplines including physics, chemistry and material science. Nevertheless, the supremacy of deep learning over conventional optimization approaches heavily depends on the huge amount of data collected in advance to train the model, which is a common bottleneck of such a data-driven technique. In this work, we present a comprehensive deep learning model for the design and characterization of nanophotonic structures, where a self-supervised learning mechanism is introduced to alleviate the burden of data acquisition. Taking reflective metasurfaces as an example, we demonstrate that the self-supervised deep learning model can effectively utilize randomly generated unlabeled data during training, with the total test loss and prediction accuracy improved by about 15% compared with the fully supervised counterpart. The proposed self-supervised learning scheme provides an efficient solution for deep learning models in some physics-related tasks where labeled data are limited or expensive to collect.