invrs-gym: a toolkit for nanophotonic inverse design research

TL;DR

invrs-gym is a versatile toolkit that facilitates nanophotonic inverse design research by providing diverse challenges, a unified interface, and modular components to accelerate innovation in photonic device development.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, multi-challenge toolkit with a unified interface for nanophotonic inverse design, enabling rapid experimentation and comparison of methods.

Findings

Includes lightweight and realistic 3D challenges for fabrication

Provides baseline algorithms for benchmarking

Supports research in objective functions and optimization algorithms

Abstract

The $\textit{invrs-gym}$ is a toolkit for research in nanophotonic inverse design, topology optimization, and AI-guided design. It includes a diverse set of challenges--representing a wide range of photonic design problems--with a common software interface that allows multiple problems to be addressed with a single code. The gym includes lightweight challenges enabling fast iteration as well as challenges involving design of realistic 3D structures, the solutions of which are suitable for fabrication. The gym is designed to be modular, enabling research in areas such as objective functions, design parameterizations, and optimization algorithms, and includes baselines against which new results can be compared. The aim is to accelerate the development and adoption of powerful methods for photonic design.