The convergence of quantum computing and distributed edge intelligence presents new possibilities for advancing federated learning in NISQ-era settings. Conventional federated learning, however, becomes increasingly vulnerable to decoherence, communication noise, and heterogeneous client data when extended to quantum-enabled systems. This work proposes an Entanglement-Aware Federated Quantum Learning (EAFQL) framework that couples local variational quantum circuit (VQC) training with a fidelity-weighted aggregation rule at the server. The use of entanglement fidelity as a weighting factor allows the aggregation process to compensate for noise-induced degradation in the client-server links. A corresponding theoretical model is developed, and the framework is implemented in a hybrid simulation environment using Qiskit and PennyLane. Experimental results show that EAFQL attains accuracy comparable to classical FedAvg while offering improved stability. The method remains effective under non-IID data distributions, synthetic depolarizing and amplitude-damping noise, and varying entanglement-distribution topologies. These findings indicate that fidelity-aware aggregation can enhance the reliability of federated learning in emerging quantum-classical edge networks.
The convergence of quantum computing and distributed edge intelligence presents new possibilities for advancing federated learning in NISQ-era settings. Conventional federated learning, however, becomes increasingly vulnerable to decoherence, communication noise, and heterogeneous client data when extended to quantum-enabled systems. This work proposes an Entanglement-Aware Federated Quantum Learning (EAFQL) framework that couples local variational quantum circuit (VQC) training with a fidelity-weighted aggregation rule at the server. The use of entanglement fidelity as a weighting factor allows the aggregation process to compensate for noise-induced degradation in the client-server links. A corresponding theoretical model is developed, and the framework is implemented in a hybrid simulation environment using Qiskit and PennyLane. Experimental results show that EAFQL attains accuracy comparable to classical FedAvg while offering improved stability. The method remains effective under non-IID data distributions, synthetic depolarizing and amplitude-damping noise, and varying entanglement-distribution topologies. These findings indicate that fidelity-aware aggregation can enhance the reliability of federated learning in emerging quantum-classical edge networks.
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) increasingly employ Federated Learning (FL) to collaboratively train models across distributed vehicular nodes while preserving data privacy. Yet, conventional FL aggregation remains susceptible to noise, latency, and security constraints inherent to real-time vehicular networks. This paper introduces Noise-Resilient Quantum Federated Learning (NR-QFL), a hybrid quantum-classical framework that enables secure, low-latency aggregation through variational quantum circuits (VQCs) operating under Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) conditions. The framework encodes model parameters as quantum states with adaptive gate reparameterization, ensuring bounded-error convergence and provable resilience under Completely Positive Trace-Preserving (CPTP) dynamics. NR-QFL employs quantum entropy-based client selection and multi-server coordination for fairness and stability. Empirical validation shows consistent convergence with reduced gradient variance, lower communication overhead, and enhanced noise tolerance under constrained edge conditions. The framework establishes a scalable foundation for quantum-enhanced federated learning, enabling secure, efficient, and dynamically stable ADAS intelligence at the vehicular edge
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) increasingly employ Federated Learning (FL) to collaboratively train models across distributed vehicular nodes while preserving data privacy. Yet, conventional FL aggregation remains susceptible to noise, latency, and security constraints inherent to real-time vehicular networks. This paper introduces Noise-Resilient Quantum Federated Learning (NR-QFL), a hybrid quantum-classical framework that enables secure, low-latency aggregation through variational quantum circuits (VQCs) operating under Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) conditions. The framework encodes model parameters as quantum states with adaptive gate reparameterization, ensuring bounded-error convergence and provable resilience under Completely Positive Trace-Preserving (CPTP) dynamics. NR-QFL employs quantum entropy-based client selection and multi-server coordination for fairness and stability. Empirical validation shows consistent convergence with reduced gradient variance, lower communication overhead, and enhanced noise tolerance under constrained edge conditions. The framework establishes a scalable foundation for quantum-enhanced federated learning, enabling secure, efficient, and dynamically stable ADAS intelligence at the vehicular edge.
Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) offers a promising framework to train quantum models across distributed clients while keeping data strictly local. Due to its simplicity and low communication overhead, Federated Averaging (FedAvg) is the standard aggregation choice in QFL literature. However, deploying QFL on practical hardware exposes a severe double-drift phenomenon: the global model is simultaneously derailed by client drift from non-IID data and hardware bias from noisy quantum gradient estimates. In this work, we first analyze the convergence of FedAvg under these realistic conditions, mathematically demonstrating that quantum hardware bias creates a persistent error floor that standard averaging cannot correct. To overcome this limitation, we propose Q-ANCHOR, a quantum-aware federated aggregation architecture that anchors server updates with zero-noise extrapolation while applying stateful client correction to suppress both client drift and hardware-induced bias. Our convergence theory proves that Q-ANCHOR successfully mitigates classical client drift while actively reducing the hardware-bias floor. Experimental results demonstrate that Q-ANCHOR achieves significantly more stable training than conventional FL baselines.
In recent years, the growing demand for secure, efficient, and scalable machine learning has highlighted significant challenges in traditional Federated Learning (FL) systems. These challenges include computational inefficiencies in handling large-scale, high-dimensional data, privacy concerns, and the limitations of classical hardware in solving complex optimization problems. Additionally, the increasing complexity of data and the need for more robust privacy-preserving methods have pushed the boundaries of classical FL. To address these issues, this paper presents a detailed framework for Quantum Federated Learning (QFL), where quantum computing and FL converge to enable distributed quantum model training with enhanced privacy preservation. The system is modeled using local quantum models on clients and a global aggregation strategy at the server. We develop quantum gradient-based optimization with quantum cross-entropy loss, privacy preservation through encryption, and robustness to quantum noise. A set of theorems is provided to prove the correctness and efficiency of the model, supported by rigorous mathematical formulations. We used IBM Qiskit for the simulation and compared our proposed QFL with classical FL. The results demonstrate that our QFL outperformed classical FL in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score.
Quantum federated learning (QFL) on NISQ hardware is highly sensitive to backend heterogeneity: some clients contribute informative updates, while others contribute noise-dominated drift that uniform averaging cannot distinguish. We propose Q-RAIL (Quantum Reliability-Aware Federated Inference and Learning), a circuit- and calibration-aware aggregation method for hardware-heterogeneous QFL. Q-RAIL computes a client-specific effective noise budget from backend calibration metadata together with transpiled circuit statistics. This budget is converted into stabilized aggregation weights using temperature scaling, uniform mixing, and a minimum-weight floor. Q-RAIL was evaluated across multiple experimental settings, including an ablation study, and benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods on three datasets: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and OrganAMNIST. On the primary MNIST benchmark under strong hardware skew, Q-RAIL improves final test accuracy from FedAvg's 0.777 to 0.877, a +10.0-point gain corresponding to about 44.8% relative error reduction, while also exceeding the strongest wpQFL baseline (0.833). At the same time, test loss drops from 0.722 to 0.585, and test AUC rises from 0.920 to 0.973. Under non-IID MNIST, Q-RAIL reaches 0.813 vs 0.722 for FedAvg. It also outperforms FedAvg in 12/12 ansatz/CX-fold stress configurations and remains stronger at 4, 10, and 15 qubit setups. Overall, the results support calibration-driven, circuit-aware aggregation as a practical path toward robust QFL on heterogeneous quantum hardware.
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising technique to realize distributed machine learning (ML) in practice. FL enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a common ML model without the need to collect raw data from clients, which therefore has merit in the protection of data privacy. On the other hand, it is known that quantum computing excels in solving specific problems that are computationally prohibitive on classical computers due to its ability to harness quantum superposition and entanglement. However, current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers have difficulties in dealing with many-qubit computation due to the lack of reliable error-correction schemes, which renders hybrid quantum-classical computing with few qubits a promising alternative. In this paper, we investigate how hybrid quantum-classical computing can be applied to FL while considering the data heterogeneity among clients. To this end, we propose the two-qubit quantum circuit-embedded convolutional neural network (2QCNN) for each client, which incorporates parallel two-qubit variational quantum circuits (VQCs) between the fully connected layers of the CNN. Simulation results show that 2QCNN outperforms the comparison schemes in terms of test accuracies. In addition, the impacts of the number and depth of parallel two-qubit VQCs on the performance of 2QCNN under various degrees of data heterogeneity are further evaluated.