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

NEC Laboratories America 2025: A Year of Disruptive Innovation

As 2025 comes to a close, NEC Laboratories America reflects on a year defined by scientific breakthroughs, global collaboration, and real-world impact. Our researchers advanced the state of the art across AI, optical networking and sensing, system security, and multimodal analytics, while expanding our intellectual property portfolio and presence at the world’s leading conferences. This year-in-review highlights the people, ideas, and partnerships that shaped 2025 and set the foundation for continued innovation in the year ahead.

Uni-LoRA: One Vector is All You Need

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become the de facto parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method for large language models (LLMs) by constraining weight updates to low-rank matrices. Recent works such as Tied-LoRA, VeRA, and VB-LoRA push efficiency further by introducing additional constraints to reduce the trainable parameter space. In this paper, we show that the parameter space reduction strategies employed by these LoRA variants can be formulated within a unified framework, Uni-LoRA, where the LoRA parameter space, flattened as a high-dimensional vector space R^D, can be reconstructed through a projection from a subspace R^d, with d ll D. We demonstrate that the fundamental difference among various LoRA methods lies in the choice of the projection matrix, P in R^(Unknown sysvar: (D times d)).Most existing LoRA variants rely on layer-wise or structure-specific projections that limit cross-layer parameter sharing, thereby compromising parameter efficiency. In light of this, we introduce an efficient and theoretically grounded projection matrix that is isometric, enabling global parameter sharing and reducing computation overhead. Furthermore, under the unified view of Uni-LoRA, this design requires only a single trainable vector to reconstruct LoRA parameters for the entire LLM – making Uni-LoRA both a unified framework and a “one-vector-only” solution. Extensive experiments on GLUE, mathematical reasoning, and instruction tuning benchmarks demonstrate that Uni-LoRA achieves state-of-the-art parameter efficiency while outperforming or matching prior approaches in predictive performance.

NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego from November 30th to December 5th, 2025

NEC Laboratories America is heading to San Diego for NeurIPS 2025, where our researchers will present cutting-edge work spanning optimization, AI systems, language modeling, and trustworthy machine learning. This year’s lineup highlights breakthroughs in areas like multi-agent coordination, scalable training, efficient inference, and techniques for detecting LLM-generated text. Together, these contributions reflect our commitment to advancing fundamental science while building real-world solutions that strengthen industry and society. We’re excited to join the global AI community in San Diego from November 30 to December 5 to share our latest innovations.

Neuromorphic Photonics-Enabled Near-Field RF Sensing with Residual Signal Recovery and Classification

We present near-field radio-frequency (RF) sensing using microwave photonic canceler (MPC) for residual signal recovery and neuromorphic photonic recurrent neural network (PRNN)chip and FPGA hardware to implement machine learning for high-bandwidth and low-latency classification.

Scalable Photonic Neurons for High-speed Automatic Modulation Classification

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is becoming increasingly critical in the context of growing demands for ultra-wideband, low-latency signal intelligence in 5G/6G systems, with photonics addressing the bandwidth and real-time adaptability limitations faced by traditional radio-frequency (RF) electronics. This paper presents the first experimental photonicimplementation of AMC, achieved through a fully functional photonic neural network built from scalable microring resonators that co-integrate electro-optic modulation and weighting. Thiswork also represents a system-level deployment of such compact photonic neurons in a real photonic neural network, demonstrating the significant potential of photonic computing forlarge-scale, complex RF intellegence for next-generation wireless communication systems.

Sound Event Classification meets Data Assimilation with Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing

Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing (DFOS) is a promising technique for large-scale acoustic monitoring. However, its wide variation in installation environments and sensor characteristics causes spatial heterogeneity. This heterogeneity makes it difficult to collect representative training data. It also degrades the generalization ability of learning-based models, such as fine-tuning methods, under a limited amount of training data. To address this, we formulate Sound Event Classification (SEC) as data assimilation in an embedding space. Instead of training models, we infer sound event classes by combining pretrained audio embeddings with simulated DFOS signals. Simulated DFOS signals are generated by applying various frequency responses and noise patterns to microphone data, which allows for diverse prior modeling of DFOS conditions. Our method achieves out-of-domain (OOD) robust classification without requiring model training. The proposed method achieved accuracy improvements of 6.42, 14.11, and 3.47 percentage points compared with conventional zero-shot and two types of fine-tune methods, respectively. By employing the simulator in the framework of data assimilation, the proposed method also enables precise estimation of physical parameters from observed DFOS signals.

THAT: Token-wise High-frequency Augmentation Transformer for Hyperspectral Pansharpening

Transformer-based methods have demonstrated strong potential in hyperspectral pansharpening by modeling long-range dependencies. However, their effectiveness is often limited by redundant token representations and a lack of multiscale feature modeling. Hyperspectral images exhibit intrinsic spectral priors (e.g., abundance sparsity) and spatial priors(e.g., non-local similarity), which are critical for accurate reconstruction. From a spectral–spatial perspective, Vision Transformers (ViTs) face two major limitations: they struggle to preserve high-frequency components—such as material edges and texture transitions, and suffer from attention dispersion across redundant tokens. These issues stem from the global self-attention mechanism, which tends to dilute high-frequency signals and overlook localized details. To address these challenges, we propose the Token-wise High-frequency AugmentationTransformer (THAT), a novel framework designed to enhance hyperspectral pansharpening through improved high-frequency feature representation and token selection. Specifically, THAT introduces: (1) Pivotal Token Selective Attention (PTSA) to prioritize informative tokens and suppress redundancy; (2) a Multi-level Variance-aware Feed-forward Network (MVFN) to enhance high-frequency detail learning. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that THAT achieves state-of-the-art performance with improved reconstruction quality and efficiency.

Leveraging Digital Twins for AII-Photonics Networks-as-a-Ser­vice: Enabling Innovation and Efficiency

This tutorial presents an architecture and methods for all-photonics networks-as-a-service in distributed Al data center infrastructures. We discuss server-based coherent transceiver architectures, remote transponder control, rapid end-to-end lightpath provisioning, digital longitudinal monitoring, and line-system calibration, demonstrating their feasibility through field validations.

Computation Stability Tracking Using Data Anchors for Fiber Rayleigh-based Nonlinear Random Projection System

We introduce anchor vectors to monitor Rayleigh-backscattering variability in a fiber-optic computing system that performs nonlinear random projection for image classification. With a ~0.4-s calibration interval, system stability can be maintained with a linear decoder, achieving an average accuracy of 80%-90%.

Digital Twins Beyond C-band Using GNPy

GNPy advancements enable accurate and efficient modeling of multiband optical networks for digital twin applications. The developed solvers for Kerr nonlinearity and SRS have been validated through simulation and experimentally in C+L transmission, supporting real-world network planning, design, and performance optimization across disaggregated optical infrastructures.