  Linear optics is a promising route to building quantum technologies that
operate at room temperature and can be manufactured scalably on integrated
photonic platforms. However, scaling up linear optics requires high-performance
operation amid inevitable manufacturing imperfections. We present techniques
for enhancing the performance of linear optical interferometers by tailoring
their port allocation and compilation to the on-chip imperfections, which can
be determined beforehand by suitable calibration procedures that we introduce.
As representative examples, we demonstrate dramatic reductions in the average
power consumption of a given interferometer or in the range of its power
consumption values across all possible unitary transformations implemented on
it. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques at improving
the fidelities of the desired transformations in the presence of fabrication
defects. By improving the performance of linear optical interferometers in
relevant metrics by several orders of magnitude, these tools bring optical
technologies closer to demonstrating true quantum advantage.
