“…Although the existence of a global optimum is mathematically and computationally evinced [14,59,60], algorithms that guarantee finding the global optimum in an exhaustive search tend to be computationally intractable, even if only layer thicknesses of less than four layers in total are considered [16]. Thus, in accordance with some theoretical and analytical investigations [1,15,28,68,71], including genetic and evolutionary approaches, multi-layer thin films are also optimized based on heuristic approaches [10,21,29,41,44,67]. Alike many of the mentioned methods, deep learning-assisted techniques are reported to optimize layer thicknesses only: Roberts et al [47] proposed a variational autoencoder, Liu et al [36] combined forward modeling and inverse design in a tandem of DNNs, and Hegde [23] blended deep learning with evolutionary elements.…”