{"paper":{"title":"What should a linear optical frontend compute? Assessing the role of meta-optics, nonlocality, and coherence in hybrid inference systems","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"physics.optics","authors_text":"Francesco Monticone, Nicholas Behrens, Yandong Li","submitted_at":"2026-08-10T23:21:57Z","abstract_excerpt":"Hybrid inference systems that pair an optical frontend with a digital backend offer a route to offload computation to the physical layer. Yet what the optics should compute, and when this is beneficial, has remained unclear. Here, we show that, for classification tasks, a well-designed optical frontend reshapes the statistics of the sensor intensity readout to improve class separability, quantified by the Bhattacharyya distance. This training-free metric predicts downstream accuracy and reveals that much of the discriminative information resides in inter-pixel correlations. We then identify th"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.10304","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2608.10304/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}