Optical Networking and Sensing

Our Optical Networking and Sensing department is leading world-class research into the next generation of optical networks and sensing systems that will power ICT-based social solutions for years. From forward-looking theoretical studies to cutting-edge experiments to world- and industry-first technology field trials, we deliver globally recognized innovation that looks into the future and translates it into present reality. Read our optical networking and sensing news and publications from our team of researchers.

Posts

CLAP-S: Support Set Based Adaptation for Downstream Fiber-optic Acoustic Recognition

Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) models have demonstrated unprecedented performance in various acoustic signal recognition tasks. Fiber optic-based acoustic recognition is one of the most important downstream tasks and plays a significant role in environmental sensing. Adapting CLAP for fiber-optic acoustic recognition has become an active research area. As a non-conventional acoustic sensor, fiber-optic acoustic recognition presents a challenging, domain-specific, low-shot deployment environment with significant domain shifts due to unique frequency response and noise characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose a support-based adaptation method, CLAP-S, which linearly interpolates a CLAP Adapter with the Support Set, leveraging both implicit knowledge through fine-tuning and explicit knowledge retrieved from memory for cross-domain generalization. Experimental results show that our method delivers competitive performance on both laboratory-recorded fiber-optic ESC-50 datasets and a real-world fiber-optic gunshot-firework dataset. Our research also provides valuable insights for other downstream acoustic recognition tasks.

VB-LoRA: Extreme Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning with Vector Banks

As the adoption of large language models increases and the need for per-user or per-task model customization grows, the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants, incur substantial storage and transmission costs. To further reduce stored parameters, we introduce a “divide-and-share” paradigm that breaks the barriers of low-rank decomposition across matrix dimensions, modules, and layers by sharing parameters globally via a vector bank. As an instantiation of the paradigm to LoRA, our proposed VB-LoRA composites all the low-rank matrices of LoRA from a shared vector bank with a differentiable top-k admixture module. VB-LoRA achieves extreme parameter efficiency while maintaining comparable or better performance compared to state-of-the-art PEFT methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VB-LoRA on natural language understanding, natural language generation, instruction tuning, and mathematical reasoning tasks. When fine-tuning the Llama2-13B model, VB-LoRA only uses 0.4% of LoRA’s stored parameters, yet achieves superior results. Our source code is available at https://github.com/leo-yangli/VB-LoRA. This method has been merged into the Hugging Face PEFT package.

Characterization and Modeling of the Noise Figure Ripple in a Dual-Stage EDFA

The noise figure ripple of a dual-stage EDFA is studied starting from experimental measurements under full spectral load conditions and defining device characteristics. Asemi-analytical model is then proposed showing 0.1 dB standard deviation on the error distribution in all cases of operation.

Enhancing Optical Multiplex Section QoT Estimation Using Scalable Gray-box DNN

In Optical Multiplex Section (OMS) control and optimization framework, end-to-end (Global) and span-by-span (Local) DNN gray-box strategies are compared in terms of scalability and accuracy of the output signal and noise power predictions. Experimental measurements are carried out in OMSs with increasing number of spans.

Field Verification of Fault Localization with Integrated Physical-Parameter-Aware Methodology

We report the first field verification of fault localization in an optical line system (OLS) by integrating digital longitudinal monitoring and OLS calibration, highlighting changes in physical metrics and parameters. Use cases shown are degradation of a fiber span loss and optical amplifier noise figure.

Optical orbital angular momentum analogy to the Stern-Gerlach experiment

Symmetry breaking has been shown to reveal interesting phenomena in physical systems. A notable example is the fundamental work of Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach [Stern and Zerlach, Z. Physik 9, 349 (1922)] nearly 100 years ago demonstrating a spin angular momentum (SAM) deflection that differed from classical theory. Here we use non-separable states of SAM and orbital angular momentum (OAM), known as vector vortex modes, to demonstrate how a classical optics analogy can be used to reveal this nonseparability, reminiscent of the work carried out by Sternand Gerlach. We show that by implementing a polarization insensitive device to measure the OAM, the SAM states can be deflected to spatially resolved positions.

Accelerating Distributed Machine Learning with an Efficient AllReduce Routing Strategy

We propose an efficient routing strategy for AllReduce transfers, which compromise of the dominant traffic in machine learning-centric datacenters, to achieve fast parameter synchronization in distributed machine learning, improving the average training time by 9%.

Extension of the Local-Optimization Global-Optimization (LOGO) Launch Power Strategy to Multi-Band Optical Networks

We propose extending the LOGO strategy for launch power settings to multi-band scenarios, maintaining low complexity while addressing key inter-band nonlinear effects and accurate amplifier models. This methodology simplifies multi-band optical multiplex section control, providing an immediate, descriptive estimation of optimized launch power.

First Field Demonstration of Hollow-Core Fibre Supporting Distributed Acoustic Sensing and DWDM Transmission

We demonstrate a method for measuring the backscatter coefficient of hollow-core fibre (HCF), and show the feasibility of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) with simultaneous 9.6-Tb/s DWDM transmission over a 1.6-km field-deployed HCF cable.

Machine Learning Model for EDFA Predicting SHB Effects

Experiments show that machine learning model of an EDFA is capable of modelling spectral hole burning effects accurately. As a result, it significantly outperforms black-box models that neglect inhomogeneous effects. Model achieves a record average RMSE of 0.0165 dB between the model predictions and measurements.