From Pixels to PCells: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Photonic Component Creation
We present PixCell, a neurosymbolic system in which multimodal agents convert a visually presented photonic component into a parametric program over a small domain-specific language (DSL) of geometric primitives. A system enabling deterministic visual verification renders evaluation asymmetrically cheaper than the generation attempt. While models using multi-seed sampling and iterative revision reach a mean best-turn IoU of only 0.416, multimodal agents through PixCell's interface and verifier consistently exceed 0.9 mean IoU, with scores reaching 0.974 and 0.955 across eight component targets while also satisfying source contracts. These results demonstrate that frontier multimodal agents can reliably understand and render executable parametric representations from visual targets. Using these live parameters, cross-stack studies on an interferometer reconstruct primitive programs that satisfy an 8.0 nm free spectral range target and the original footprint constraint on modeled 220-nm SOI, 400-nm SiN, and 400-nm TFLN stacks. PixCell further carries a paper-derived splitter from visual reconstruction through SOI full-wave simulation, producing symmetric propagation and balanced outputs. Finally, the same executable verifier supplies a training reward and dataset used to train a Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model with LoRA and GRPO without supervised demonstrations. On eight training-excluded paper figures, its mean champion IoU rises from 0.422 after eight initial attempts to 0.491 after three verifier-guided revision rounds. These results therefore establish a controlled framework for measuring, retargeting, and improving visual-to-parametric photonic component design.