A Comprehensive Comparative Study of Active Learning Schemes for Nanophotonics Design

We present a benchmarking study of active learning (AL) schemes for designing planar multilayer nanophotonic metamaterials, where the design tasks are formulated as binary optimization problems. Different surrogate models, including factorization machine (FM), Gaussian process regression (GPR), and convolutional neural network (CNN), combined with different optimization methods, including exhaustive enumeration, discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO), quantum annealing (QA), hybrid QA, and simulated annealing are studied. The benchmark cases investigated range from small problems with short binary lengths ( N = 25) to large problems with N up to 100, focusing on the design of two classes of photonic structures, including antireflective coatings for the long‐wavelength infrared region and transparent radiative coolers. For small problems, CNN coupled with DPSO in AL achieves the best performance. As N increases, FM with QA outperforms GPR and CNN. For FM‐based AL, hybrid QA yields the best optimization results, particularly in high‐dimensional cases ( N = 100). These results demonstrate that the optimization method can significantly affect in AL performance as N increases, and that QA‐based optimization can provide practical routes for mitigating the optimization bottleneck in high‐dimensional problems.