Photonic Reservoir Computer with Output Expansion for Unsupervized Parameter Drift Compensation

We present a method to improve the performance of a reservoir computer by keeping the reservoir fixed and increasing the number of output neurons. The additional neurons are nonlinear functions, typically chosen randomly, of the reservoir neurons. We demonstrate the interest of this expanded output layer on an experimental opto-electronic system subject to slow parameter drift which results in loss of performance. We can partially recover the lost performance by using the output layer expansion. The proposed scheme allows for a trade-off between performance gains and system complexity.