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arXiv:2505.11631 · International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC)

Enhancing Network Anomaly Detection with Quantum GANs and Successive Data Injection for Multivariate Time Series

Wajdi Hammami, Soumaya Cherkaoui, Shengrui Wang

Published May 12, 2025• 7 citations
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Abstract

Quantum computing may offer new approaches for advancing machine learning, including in complex tasks such as anomaly detection in network traffic. In this paper, we introduce a quantum generative adversarial network (QGAN) architecture for multivariate time-series anomaly detection that leverages variational quantum circuits (VQCs) in combination with a time-window shifting technique, data re-uploading, and successive data injection (SuDaI). The method encodes multivariate time series data as rotation angles. By integrating both data re-uploading and SuDaI, the approach maps classical data into quantum states efficiently, helping to address hardware limitations such as the restricted number of available qubits. In addition, the approach employs an anomaly scoring technique that utilizes both the generator and the discriminator output to enhance the accuracy of anomaly detection. The QGAN was trained using the parameter shift rule and benchmarked against a classical GAN. Experimental results indicate that the quantum model achieves a accuracy high along with high recall and F1-scores in anomaly detection, and attains a lower MSE compared to the classical model. Notably, the QGAN accomplishes this performance with only 80 parameters, demonstrating competitive results with a compact architecture. Tests using a noisy simulator suggest that the approach remains effective under realistic noise-prone conditions.

DOI
10.1109/iwcmc65282.2025.11059562

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Quantum computing may offer new approaches for advancing machine learning, including in complex tasks such as anomaly detection in network traffic. In this paper, we introduce a quantum generative adversarial network (QGAN) architecture for multivariate time-series anomaly detection that leverages variational quantum circuits (VQCs) in combination with a time-window shifting technique, data re-uploading, and successive data injection (SuDaI). The method encodes multivariate time series data as rotation angles. By integrating both data re-uploading and SuDaI, the approach maps classical data into quantum states efficiently, helping to address hardware limitations such as the restricted number of available qubits. In addition, the approach employs an anomaly scoring technique that utilizes both the generator and the discriminator output to enhance the accuracy of anomaly detection. The QGAN was trained using the parameter shift rule and benchmarked against a classical GAN. Experimental results indicate that the quantum model achieves a accuracy high along with high recall and F1-scores in anomaly detection, and attains a lower MSE compared to the classical model. Notably, the QGAN accomplishes this performance with only 80 parameters, demonstrating competitive results with a compact architecture. Tests using a noisy simulator suggest that the approach remains effective under realistic noise-prone conditions.
Abstract Classical GAN architectures have shown interesting results for solving anomaly detection problems in general and for time series anomalies in particular, such as those arising in communication networks. In recent years, several quantum GAN (QGAN) architectures have been proposed in the literature. When detecting anomalies in time series using QGANs, huge challenges arise due to the limited number of qubits compared to the size of the data. To address these challenges, a new high‐dimensional encoding approach, named Successive Data Injection (SuDaI) is proposed. In this approach, SuDaI explores a larger portion of the quantum state, compared to the conventional angle encoding method used predominantly in the literature. This is achieved through repeated data injections into the quantum state. SuDaI encoding allows the authors to adapt the QGAN for anomaly detection with network data of a much higher dimensionality than with the existing known QGANs implementations. In addition, SuDaI encoding applies to other types of high‐dimensional time series and can be used in contexts beyond anomaly detection and QGANs, opening up therefore multiple fields of application.
Abstract Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a machine learning framework comprising a generative model for sampling from a target distribution and a discriminative model for evaluating the proximity of a sample to the target distribution. GANs exhibit strong performance in imaging or anomaly detection. However, they suffer from training instabilities, and sampling efficiency may be limited by the classical sampling procedure. We introduce variational quantum–classical Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) to address these issues and embed this model in a classical machine learning framework for anomaly detection. Classical WGANs improve training stability by using a cost function better suited for gradient descent. Our model replaces the generator of WGANs with a hybrid quantum–classical neural net and leaves the classical discriminative model unchanged. This way, high-dimensional classical data only enters the classical model and need not be prepared in a quantum circuit. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on a credit card fraud dataset. For this dataset our method shows performance on par with classical methods in terms of the F 1 score. We analyze the influence of the circuit ansatz, layer width and depth, neural net architecture parameter initialization strategy, and sampling noise on convergence and performance.
Anomaly detection in time series is constrained by the scarcity and unpredictability of real anomalous events. Classical supervised and generative approaches struggle to capture the statistical complexity of rare, high-impact anomalies while maintaining realistic normal dynamics. This work introduces a Quantum Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (QWGAN) for synthetic anomaly generation that separates the modeling of normal and anomalous behaviors using quantum parameterized circuits. Leveraging quantum superposition and entanglement, the QWGAN achieves a richer generative capacity with an order-of-magnitude reduction in parameters compared to classical counterparts. The model is trained and evaluated on cyber security datasets, demonstrating lower Earth Mover’s Distance and volatility error while preserving temporal structure and distributional fidelity. A windowed synthesis mechanism enables controlled injection of variable-length point and contextual anomalies. Our results demonstrate that QWGAN provides a scalable, parameter-efficient approach for generating high-fidelity synthetic anomalous time series data to enable effective benchmarking and augmentation of anomaly detection models under limited anomaly data.
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are vital for securing modern networks, but traditional machine learning-based anomaly detection methods often struggle with high-dimensional and imbalanced data. Although classical GANs help improve data generation, they are computationally intensive and limited in scalability. Quantum GANs (QGANs) present a promising alternative, but existing approaches are tested only in simulations. Instead, using real devices presents challenges not only because of the impact of quantum noise but, more significantly, due to usage restrictions imposed by their high cost. To cope with this, we propose a lightweight but effective hybrid QGAN for network intrusion detection, adopting a hybrid training approach by switching between an IBM real quantum device and its noisy simulator version, balancing computational feasibility and relevance in the real world. The results show that our model performs consistently, with minimal performance loss on real hardware.
In increasingly complex digital environments, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are essential for maintaining network security. Traditional machine learning techniques face challenges, including difficulties with high-dimensional data and performance issues when dealing with unbalanced datasets. Although Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) provide an acceptable alternative by improving data creation, their traditional implementations are computationally demanding and have limitations when it comes to examining intricate data distributions. Quantum GANs (QGANs) use the benefits of quantum computing to solve these problems. Therefore, a distributed approach improves load balancing and mitigate the impact of quantum noise for NISQ devices. The proposed model efficiently learns the distribution of benign data by employing a federated hybrid QGAN architecture that combines a quantum generators with a classical discriminators. This allows the model to produce samples that closely mimic patterns found in real data. The generator in the proposed QGAN is a variational quantum circuit (VQC), and the discriminator is a neural network. Tested on the NSL-KDD dataset, the federated QGAN offers a promising option for next-generation IDS.
The increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape requires more advanced network anomaly detection systems. Although, classical machine learning models are known to be effective, they reach computational bottlenecks when processing high-dimensional data. This study investigates the potential of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) for network traffic anomaly detection by evaluating four distinct Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) architectures. A synthetic network traffic dataset is generated for the evaluations. The VQC models systematically varied feature encoding methods, parameterized ansatz circuits, quantum neural network types, and classical optimizers. Experimental results show that a trade-off exists between circuit expressivity and optimization stability. Deeper circuits (VQC-4) achieved higher accuracy of upto 89.0\%, while simultaneously being sensitive to training conditions. A shallower variant (VQC-1) under performed, although it had consistent and stable optimization curves. Class-dependent biases were also observed such as in VQC-2, where the model struggled to find an effective decision boundary, and produced a large number of false negatives. The best performing model in this study (VQC-3) combined ZFeatureMap with RealAmplitudes ansatz, optimized using ADAM. Comparative analysis against classical machine learning models such as Support Vector Machine and Random Forest reveal a performance gap, where classical models are able to achieve perfect classification performance on the synthetic data. It is concluded that classical algorithms remain dominant in their ability to classify structured data with relatively simple class separations. However, due to the observed potential of certain VQC configurations to learn decision boundaries to classify data, their utility for future applications in noisier, higher-dimensional problems is highlighted.