Rakesh Saini

Muhammad Bilal Akram Dastagir, Rakesh Saini, Omer Tariq +4 more

The recent convergence of 6G wireless systems and Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) has driven the need for on-device intelligence in edge networks, where ultra-low latency, stringent energy budgets, and tight compute constraints demand novel architectures. Lightweight deep models efficiently extract local patterns but fail to capture global dependencies, while attention mechanisms do so at the expense of energy and computational cost. To bridge this gap, we introduce Quantumer, a hybrid TinyML--quantum framework that integrates multi-scale dilated convolutions and scaled dot-product attention within a lightweight transformer architecture, employing a two-stage transfer learning pipeline from Quantum Pre-Training (Quantumer-Q) to Classical Fine-Tuning (Quantumer-C). We also present QuantiblentLayer, a four-qubit variational circuit that maps compact traffic representations into measurement-based Hilbert-space features using trainable rotations and cyclic entangling operations. The circuit is used only during offline pre-training as a nonlinear embedding teacher and is removed before Quantumer-C deployment, leaving a fully classical inference model without runtime quantum execution. By transferring these quantum-assisted embeddings into an energy-efficient, lightweight transformer, Quantumer achieves strong detection performance with minimal compute and memory overhead on resource-constrained edge devices. The intrusion detection system (IDS) is used as a case study and evaluated on the Edge-IIoTset, TON IoT, and WUSTL-IIoT-2021 datasets. Quantumer-Q achieves competitive compact-model performance with 105.86K parameters, 0.4038 MB memory usage, 0.5525 MB model size, and 5.5646 MFLOPs; the INT8 Raspberry Pi 4 deployment obtains 16.8413 ms latency with a 0.6493 MB footprint. These results support training-time quantum-assisted representation learning for compact edge-deployable IDS.

Rakesh Saini, Nora Mohamed, Saif Al-Kuwari +1 more

The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) has emerged as a promising approach for solving NP hard combinatorial optimization problems on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. However, its performance is critically dependent on the selection of the circuit depth a parameter that must be specified a priori without clear guidance. In this paper, we introduce a variant of QAOA called dynamic depth Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (DDQAOA) that resolves the challenge of pre selecting a fixed circuit depth. Our method adaptively expands circuit depth, starting from p = 1 and progressing up to p = 10, by transferring learned parameters to deeper circuits based on convergence criteria. We tested this approach on 100 instances of the Constrained Shortest Path Problem (CSPP) at 10 qubit and 16 qubit scales. Our DDQAOA achieved superior approximation ratios and success probabilities with fewer CNOT gate evaluations than the standard QAOA for p = 3, 5, 10, and 15. In particular, while standard QAOA at p = 15 achieved results close to our approach, it used 217% and 159.3% more CNOT gates for 10 qubit and 16 qubit instances, respectively. This demonstrates the performance and practical applicability of DDQAOA to solve combinatorial optimization problems on near term devices.