I hope discussions of ML applications is OK in this sub. I came across this article recently about researchers in the field of photonics, which doesn’t have a lot of analytical equations to calculate performance by hand, using some basic ML techniques to create high performance components for photonic integrated circuits. They start with a black box, feed in the desired output performance, and then use basic electromagnetic boundary conditions and ML to work backward to what would be required to get there. They call this “inverse design”.

This paper goes into it a little more and shows an example of the result of the technique: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00095.pdf