LensDesigner

Research paper 2026

LensDesignerA Self-Improving Agent for
Optical Lens Design

Learning the craft of optical design, one experience at a time.

Lei Sun1,*Haoran Liang1,*Dannong Xu1Yao Gao2Yuyu Geng2 Jinjin Gu1Kaiwei Wang2,†Danda Pani Paudel1Luc Van Gool1

1 INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”2 Zhejiang University

* Equal contribution † Corresponding author

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Comparison of experience-driven manual lens design and LensDesigner's self-improving workflow, which accumulates reusable optical design skills.
From expert experience to an agent that learns: LensDesigner accumulates and reuses optical design skills.

The idea

Optical design that learns from experience.

Optical lens design relies on expert intuition to explore a complex space of shapes, materials, and physical constraints. LensDesigner brings this experience-driven process to an autonomous agent.

The framework retrieves physically valid starting structures from LensLib100K, refines them through feedback from an optical simulator, and stores reusable design heuristics. A curriculum agent proposes increasingly difficult tasks so the system can build its expertise over time. We evaluate it on LensArena, a benchmark of 120 optical design tasks spanning common and extreme configurations.

01 / INITIALIZE

Retrieve a starting point

Optics-aware retrieval selects structural seeds from LensLib100K.

02 / DESIGN

Refine with physics

The agent orchestrates structural changes and local optimization with simulator feedback.

03 / IMPROVE

Build reusable skills

A curriculum guides experience accumulation across progressively harder tasks.

Explore the framework
LensDesigner framework showing optics-aware retrieval, an interactive design environment, and curriculum-guided skill evolution.
LensDesigner combines retrieval, physical simulation, and a growing library of design skills.

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BibTeX
@misc{sun2026lensdesigner,
  title  = {{LensDesigner}: A Self-Improving Agent for Optical Lens Design},
  author = {Sun, Lei and Liang, Haoran and Xu, Dannong and Gao, Yao
            and Geng, Yuyu and Gu, Jinjin and Wang, Kaiwei
            and Paudel, Danda Pani and Van Gool, Luc},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://Danielxu0208.github.io/LensDesigner/}
}