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arXiv:2604.06265

SMT-AD: a scalable quantum-inspired anomaly detection approach

Apimuk Sornsaeng, Si Min Chan, Wenxuan Zhang, Swee Liang Wong, Joshua Lim, Jonathan Pan, Dario Poletti

cs.LGcond-mat.stat-mechquant-phSubmitted Apr 7, 2026• Announced Apr 8, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Jun 18, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Apr 7, 2026v2 · Jun 18, 2026
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Abstract

Quantum-inspired tensor networks algorithms have shown to be effective and efficient models for machine learning tasks, including anomaly detection. Here, we propose a highly parallelizable quantum-inspired approach which we call SMT-AD from Superposition of Multiresolution Tensors for Anomaly Detection. It is based upon the superposition of bond-dimension-1 matrix product operators to transform the input data with Fourier-assisted feature embedding, where the number of learnable parameters grows linearly with feature size, embedding resolutions, and the number of additional components in the matrix product operators structure. We demonstrate successful anomaly detection when applied to standard datasets, including credit card transactions, and find that, even with minimal configurations, it achieves competitive performance against established anomaly detection baselines. Furthermore, it provides a straightforward way to reduce the weight of the model and even improve the performance by highlighting the most relevant input features.

Comments
12 pages, 5 figures

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Quantum machine learning offers the ability to capture complex correlations in high-dimensional feature spaces, crucial for the challenge of detecting beyond the Standard Model physics in collider events, along with the potential for unprecedented computational efficiency in future quantum processors. Near-term utilization of these benefits can be achieved by developing quantum-inspired algorithms for deployment in classical hardware to enable applications at the "edge" of current scientific experiments. This work demonstrates the use of tensor networks for real-time anomaly detection in collider detectors. A spaced matrix product operator (SMPO) is developed that provides sensitivity to a variety beyond the Standard Model benchmarks, and can be implemented in field programmable gate array hardware with resources and latency consistent with trigger deployment. The cascaded SMPO architecture is introduced as an SMPO variation that affords greater flexibility and efficiency in ways that are key to edge applications in resource-constrained environments. These results reveal the benefit and near-term feasibility of deploying quantum-inspired ML in high energy colliders.
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The emerging field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has shown promising advantages in accelerating processing speed and effectively handling the high dimensionality associated with complex datasets. Quantum Computing (QC) enables more efficient data manipulation through the quantum properties of superposition and entanglement. In this paper, we present a novel approach combining quantum and classical machine learning techniques to explore the impact of quantum properties for anomaly detection in Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data. We compare the performance of a Hybrid-Fully Connected Quantum Neural Network (H-FQNN) with different loss functions and use a publicly available ADSB dataset to evaluate the performance. The results demonstrate competitive performance in detecting anomalies, with accuracies ranging from 90.17% to 94.05%, comparable to the performance of a traditional Fully Connected Neural Network (FNN) model, which achieved accuracies between 91.50% and 93.37%.
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