Ruben Ohana

LightOn Optical Processing Unit : Scaling-up AI and HPC with a Non von Neumann co-processor

2021

Beyond pure Von Neumann processing Scalability of AI / HPC models is limited by the Von Neumann bottleneck for accessing massive amounts of memory, driving up power consumption.

ADVERSARIAL ROBUSTNESS BY DESIGN THROUGH ANALOG COMPUTING AND SYNTHETIC GRADIENTS

2021 · arXiv (Cornell University)

We propose a new defense mechanism against adversarial attacks inspired by an optical co-processor, providing robustness without compromising natural accuracy in both white-box and black-box settings. This hardware co-processor performs a nonlinear fixed random transformation, …

xVal: A Continuous Numerical Tokenization for Scientific Language Models

2023 · arXiv (Cornell University)

Due in part to their discontinuous and discrete default encodings for numbers, Large Language Models (LLMs) have not yet been commonly used to process numerically-dense scientific datasets. Rendering datasets as text, however, could help aggregate …

Streamlined optical training of large-scale modern deep learning architectures with direct feedback alignment

2026 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Modern deep learning relies nearly exclusively on dedicated electronic hardware accelerators. Photonic approaches, with low consumption and high operation speed, are increasingly considered for inference but, to date, remain mostly limited to relatively basic tasks. …