Monolithically integrated photonic neural network at driven-dissipative criticality
Artificial intelligence increasingly demands computing architectures capable of adaptive representation, temporal information processing, and robust operation under uncertainty. However, conventional photonic neural architectures typically rely on predefined computational operations and separate functional modules, limiting the ability of physical systems to exploit their intrinsic dynamics for intelligence. Here, we demonstrate a monolithically integrated active photonic neural network (APNN) that harnesses driven-dissipative criticality as a physical computational resource. By balancing optical excitation and dissipation, the system operates near a critical regime where weak input-dependent variations are amplified into separable representations while stable attractor dynamics are preserved. The APNN integrates an optoelectronic nonlinear array and a reconfigurable symmetric optical coupling matrix on a silicon photonic chip, enabling recurrent physical computation within a compact closed loop. We demonstrate nonlinear classification with 95.2% accuracy using only 100 training samples and 44 trainable parameters. And it remains robust at an ultralow signal-to-noise ratio of -30 dB. Beyond static recognition, the same driven-dissipative dynamics enable long-range temporal feature extraction from electrocardiogram signals and associative recovery of corrupted patterns through attractor-based relaxation. These results establish driven-dissipative criticality as a unified mechanism for representation enhancement, temporal information retention, and error-resilient computation, providing a pathway toward scalable photonic systems in which intelligence emerges from intrinsic physical dynamics.