Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

International Journal of Emerging Research in Science Engineering and Management

Noisy HQNNs: A Comprehensive Analysis of Noise Robustness and Noise Mitigation in Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks

R G Kumar, A Gokul Sai, T Durga Prasad, R. DEEPIKA, A Balu

Published Apr 10, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This work focuses on the design and evaluation of Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (HQNNs) that integrate the computational advantages of quantum circuits with the learning flexibility of classical deep neural networks to enhance machine learning performance in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era.The study investigates two prominent HQNN architectures, namely Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) and Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuanNNs), with an emphasis on their robustness under realistic quantum noise conditions.It was evaluated using image classification tasks.Under various quantum noise channels, including Bit Flip, Phase Flip, Phase Damping, Amplitude Damping, and Depolarizing Noise, were introduced to reflect realistic hardware conditions.To reduce noise-induced performance loss, error mitigation techniques such as Zero-Noise Extrapolation, Probabilistic Error Cancellation, and Measurement Error Mitigation were applied.In addition, an AI-assisted adaptive framework is proposed to automatically recommend suitable mitigation strategies based on observed noise behavior and circuit characteristics.Experimental results indicate that QuanNN exhibits strong robustness under lowto-moderate noise levels and maintains stable performance even under high bit-flip noise, while QCNN demonstrates occasional performance gains under specific noisy configurations but degrades more rapidly as noise intensity increases.The proposed AI-guided mitigation mechanism further enhances model stability across varying noise regimes.This study provides practical insights into architecture selection, noise resilience, and intelligent error mitigation integration, offering a scalable framework for deploying HQNNs in real-world NISQ-era quantum machine learning applications.

DOI
10.58482/ijersem.v2i4.10

Related papers

Noisy HQNNs: A Comprehensive Analysis of Noise Robustness in Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks

Tasnim Ahmed, Alberto Marchisio, Muhammad Kashif +1 more

Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (HQNNs) offer promising potential of quantum computing while retaining the flexibility of classical deep learning. However, the limitations of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices introduce significant challenges in achieving ideal performance due to noise interference, such as decoherence, gate errors, and readout errors. This paper presents an extensive comparative analysis of two HQNN algorithms, Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) and Quanvolutional Neural Network (QuanNN), assessing their noise resilience across diverse image classification tasks. We systematically inject noise into variational quantum circuits using five quantum noise channels: Phase Flip, Bit Flip, Phase Damping, Amplitude Damping, and Depolarizing Noise. By varying noise probabilities from 0.1 to 1.0, we evaluate the correlation between noise robustness and model behavior across different noise levels.Our findings demonstrate that different noise types and levels significantly influence HQNN performance. The QuanNN shows robust performance across most noise channels for low noise levels (0.1 - 0.4), but succumbs to diverse effects of depolarizing and amplitude damping noise at probabilities between (0.5 - 1.0). However, the QuanNN exhibits robustness to bit flip noise at high probabilities (0.9 - 1.0). On the other hand, the QCNN tends to benefit from the noise injection by outperforming noise-free models for bit flip, phase flip, and phase damping at high noise probabilities. However, for other noise types, the QCNN shows gradual performance degradation as noise increases. These insights aim to guide future research in error mitigation strategies to enhance HQNN models in the NISQ era.

arXiv:2505.03378•International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)•Jun 30, 2025•6 citations

A comparative analysis and noise robustness evaluation in quantum neural networks

Tasnim Ahmed, Muhammad Kashif, Alberto Marchisio +1 more

In current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs) offer a promising solution, combining the strengths of classical machine learning with quantum computing capabilities. However, the performance of these networks can be significantly affected by the quantum noise inherent in NISQ devices. In this paper, we conduct an extensive comparative analysis of various HQNN algorithms, namely Quantum Convolution Neural Network (QCNN), Quanvolutional Neural Network (QuanNN), and Quantum Transfer Learning (QTL), for image classification tasks. We evaluate the performance of each algorithm across quantum circuits with different entangling structures, variations in layer count, and optimal placement in the architecture. Subsequently, we select the highest-performing architectures and assess their robustness against noise influence by introducing quantum gate noise through Phase Flip, Bit Flip, Phase Damping, Amplitude Damping, and the Depolarization Channel. Our results reveal that the top-performing models exhibit varying resilience to different noise channels. However, in most scenarios, the QuanNN demonstrates greater robustness across various quantum noise channels, consistently outperforming other models. This highlights the importance of tailoring model selection to specific noise environments in NISQ devices.

Scientific Reports•Sep 29, 2025•22 citations

Robustness Evaluation of Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks under Noise Models via System-Level Error Mitigation

Jesse Roberta Mingue Njiki, Nouhaila Innan, Alberto Marchisio +3 more

Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) represent a promising direction within Quantum Machine Learning (QML), yet their realization on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices remains constrained by decoherence, gate imperfections, crosstalk, and readout errors. This study provides a systematic evaluation of noise effects and mitigation strategies in hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs). Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), Digital Dynamical Decoupling (DDD), and Layerwise Richardson Extrapolation (LRE) are incorporated into end-to-end QNN training pipelines developed with PennyLane, simulated using Qiskit Aer noise models, and integrated with the Mitiq framework, while Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC) is evaluated separately under depolarizing noise due to its computational cost. Experiments conducted on the Iris dataset with five representative noise channels show that the impact of noise and the effect of mitigation are strongly dependent on the noise model and its strength. The model maintains comparatively strong performance under phase-flip and phase-damping noise, while substantial degradation is observed under high depolarizing and amplitude-damping noise. Across the evaluated mitigation methods, the observed benefits remain limited and noise-dependent: ZNE, DDD, and LRE generally follow the same degradation trends as the unmitigated baseline, while PEC shows limited gains only in the low-noise depolarizing regime. These findings highlight the need for context-specific mitigation strategies to improve the robustness of QNNs in practical NISQ settings.

quant-pharXiv:2604.17515•Apr 21, 2026•0 citations

Quantum Neural Networks: A Comparative Analysis and Noise Robustness Evaluation

Tasnim Ahmed, Muhammad Kashif, Alberto Marchisio +1 more

In current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs) offer a promising solution, combining the strengths of classical machine learning with quantum computing capabilities. However, the performance of these networks can be significantly affected by the quantum noise inherent in NISQ devices. In this paper, we conduct an extensive comparative analysis of various HQNN algorithms, namely Quantum Convolution Neural Network (QCNN), Quanvolutional Neural Network (QuanNN), and Quantum Transfer Learning (QTL), for image classification tasks. We evaluate the performance of each algorithm across quantum circuits with different entangling structures, variations in layer count, and optimal placement in the architecture. Subsequently, we select the highest-performing architectures and assess their robustness against noise influence by introducing quantum gate noise through Phase Flip, Bit Flip, Phase Damping, Amplitude Damping, and the Depolarizing Channel. Our results reveal that the top-performing models exhibit varying resilience to different noise gates. However, in most scenarios, the QuanNN demonstrates greater robustness across various quantum noise channels, consistently outperforming other models. This highlights the importance of tailoring model selection to specific noise environments in NISQ devices.

arXiv:2501.14412•Jan 24, 2025•3 citations

Noise-Robust Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks

Jesus Rafael Gil

uantum computing offers the potential to solve selected computational problems more efficiently than classical systems by leveraging quantum mechanical principles such as superposition and entanglement. However, current quantum devices operate in the noisy intermediatescale quantum (NISQ) regime, where limited coherence times, gate errors, measurement instability, and hardware variability significantly constrain practical performance. As a result, many quantum machine learning architectures that appear promising under idealized simulation conditions experience substantial degradation when executed under realistic noisy environments. This thesis investigates the problem of robustness in hybrid quantum neural network (HQNN) systems operating under realistic NISQ conditions. Rather than focusing primarily on quantum expressivity or claims of quantum advantage, the work examines whether practical hybrid quantum learning can maintain stable optimization and reliable inference in the presence of stochastic perturbations. A robustness-engineering framework is developed that integrates learned-readout decoding, multi-observable quantum feature extraction, architecture-level optimization, stability-aware training, and noise-augmented learning within a unified hybrid quantum-classical pipeline. To evaluate the framework, a comprehensive benchmarking methodology is developed across multiple datasets, architectures, perturbation environments, software frameworks, and hardware platforms. The experiments compare classical machine learning models, quantum kernel methods, and several HQNN architectures, including quanvolutional neural networks, quantum convolutional neural networks, and quantum transfer learning systems. Performance is evaluated under both noiseless and noisy conditions using standardized metrics, cross-noise validation, architecture-level comparisons, and real IBM Quantum hardware execution. The results demonstrate that baseline HQNN systems are highly sensitive to optimization instability, parity-based information loss, measurement variability, and perturbation accumulation. The experiments further reveal that robustness, rather than representational expressivity alone, is the dominant factor limiting practical hybrid quantum learning under realistic NISQ conditions. Through successive robustness-engineering stages, noisy performance improves from approximately 0.37 to 0.50 in baseline architectures to approximately 0.97 under several benchmark environments while maintaining substantially improved stability and reduced degradation under perturbation. These findings establish robustness as a central design objective for practical quantum machine learning. The thesis demonstrates that reliable hybrid quantum learning emerges through coordinated interaction between quantum feature generation, adaptive classical inference, stability-aware optimization, and hardware-aware architecture design. More broadly, the results suggest that hybrid quantum-AI systems are most effective when viewed as integrated quantum-classical computational frameworks in which quantum circuits function as probabilistic feature generators operating within larger robustness-oriented learning pipelines.

•Jul 1, 2026•0 citations

A Comprehensive Analysis of Accuracy and Robustness in Quantum Neural Networks

Ban Q. Tran, Duong M. Chu, Hai T. D. Pham +3 more

Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has recently emerged as a highly promising research frontier. Within this domain, Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs),characterized by Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) at their core and featuring layers of quantum gates optimized by classical algorithms, have garnered significant attention. However, a rigorous and exhaustive evaluation of their practical performance remains largely incomplete. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of three prominent hybrid classical-quantum architectures: Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNN), Quantum Recurrent Neural Networks (QRNN), and Quantum Vision Transformers (QViT), focusing on the critical dimensions of generalization, accuracy, and robustness. Our findings provide novel insights that address previous evaluative gaps. Notably, while these models exhibit exceptional performance on low-feature datasets such as MNIST, their learning efficacy degrades significantly when transitioned to high-feature datasets. Furthermore, convolutional-based models like QCNN appear less effective on high-dimensional data than other machine learning architectures. Additionally, while all models are susceptible to adversarial noise, traditional architectures, such as recurrent and convolutional networks, demonstrate superior resilience. Conversely, in the presence of quantum noise, the transformer-based architecture proves its strength by maintaining high robustness against measurement noise, channel noise, and finite-shot effects, whereas other architectures suffer marked performance declines. These results provide a granular perspective on the current state of the field and underscore the critical importance of tailoring model selection to the constraints of contemporary Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) environments.

quant-pharXiv:2604.26110•Apr 30, 2026•0 citations
This work focuses on the design and evaluation of Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (HQNNs) that integrate the computational advantages of quantum circuits with the learning flexibility of classical deep neural networks to enhance machine learning performance in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era.The study investigates two prominent HQNN architectures, namely Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) and Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuanNNs), with an emphasis on their robustness under realistic quantum noise conditions.It was evaluated using image classification tasks.Under various quantum noise channels, including Bit Flip, Phase Flip, Phase Damping, Amplitude Damping, and Depolarizing Noise, were introduced to reflect realistic hardware conditions.To reduce noise-induced performance loss, error mitigation techniques such as Zero-Noise Extrapolation, Probabilistic Error Cancellation, and Measurement Error Mitigation were applied.In addition, an AI-assisted adaptive framework is proposed to automatically recommend suitable mitigation strategies based on observed noise behavior and circuit characteristics.Experimental results indicate that QuanNN exhibits strong robustness under lowto-moderate noise levels and maintains stable performance even under high bit-flip noise, while QCNN demonstrates occasional performance gains under specific noisy configurations but degrades more rapidly as noise intensity increases.The proposed AI-guided mitigation mechanism further enhances model stability across varying noise regimes.This study provides practical insights into architecture selection, noise resilience, and intelligent error mitigation integration, offering a scalable framework for deploying HQNNs in real-world NISQ-era quantum machine learning applications.
Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (HQNNs) offer promising potential of quantum computing while retaining the flexibility of classical deep learning. However, the limitations of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices introduce significant challenges in achieving ideal performance due to noise interference, such as decoherence, gate errors, and readout errors. This paper presents an extensive comparative analysis of two HQNN algorithms, Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) and Quanvolutional Neural Network (QuanNN), assessing their noise resilience across diverse image classification tasks. We systematically inject noise into variational quantum circuits using five quantum noise channels: Phase Flip, Bit Flip, Phase Damping, Amplitude Damping, and Depolarizing Noise. By varying noise probabilities from 0.1 to 1.0, we evaluate the correlation between noise robustness and model behavior across different noise levels.Our findings demonstrate that different noise types and levels significantly influence HQNN performance. The QuanNN shows robust performance across most noise channels for low noise levels (0.1 - 0.4), but succumbs to diverse effects of depolarizing and amplitude damping noise at probabilities between (0.5 - 1.0). However, the QuanNN exhibits robustness to bit flip noise at high probabilities (0.9 - 1.0). On the other hand, the QCNN tends to benefit from the noise injection by outperforming noise-free models for bit flip, phase flip, and phase damping at high noise probabilities. However, for other noise types, the QCNN shows gradual performance degradation as noise increases. These insights aim to guide future research in error mitigation strategies to enhance HQNN models in the NISQ era.
In current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs) offer a promising solution, combining the strengths of classical machine learning with quantum computing capabilities. However, the performance of these networks can be significantly affected by the quantum noise inherent in NISQ devices. In this paper, we conduct an extensive comparative analysis of various HQNN algorithms, namely Quantum Convolution Neural Network (QCNN), Quanvolutional Neural Network (QuanNN), and Quantum Transfer Learning (QTL), for image classification tasks. We evaluate the performance of each algorithm across quantum circuits with different entangling structures, variations in layer count, and optimal placement in the architecture. Subsequently, we select the highest-performing architectures and assess their robustness against noise influence by introducing quantum gate noise through Phase Flip, Bit Flip, Phase Damping, Amplitude Damping, and the Depolarization Channel. Our results reveal that the top-performing models exhibit varying resilience to different noise channels. However, in most scenarios, the QuanNN demonstrates greater robustness across various quantum noise channels, consistently outperforming other models. This highlights the importance of tailoring model selection to specific noise environments in NISQ devices.
Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) represent a promising direction within Quantum Machine Learning (QML), yet their realization on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices remains constrained by decoherence, gate imperfections, crosstalk, and readout errors. This study provides a systematic evaluation of noise effects and mitigation strategies in hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs). Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), Digital Dynamical Decoupling (DDD), and Layerwise Richardson Extrapolation (LRE) are incorporated into end-to-end QNN training pipelines developed with PennyLane, simulated using Qiskit Aer noise models, and integrated with the Mitiq framework, while Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC) is evaluated separately under depolarizing noise due to its computational cost. Experiments conducted on the Iris dataset with five representative noise channels show that the impact of noise and the effect of mitigation are strongly dependent on the noise model and its strength. The model maintains comparatively strong performance under phase-flip and phase-damping noise, while substantial degradation is observed under high depolarizing and amplitude-damping noise. Across the evaluated mitigation methods, the observed benefits remain limited and noise-dependent: ZNE, DDD, and LRE generally follow the same degradation trends as the unmitigated baseline, while PEC shows limited gains only in the low-noise depolarizing regime. These findings highlight the need for context-specific mitigation strategies to improve the robustness of QNNs in practical NISQ settings.
In current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs) offer a promising solution, combining the strengths of classical machine learning with quantum computing capabilities. However, the performance of these networks can be significantly affected by the quantum noise inherent in NISQ devices. In this paper, we conduct an extensive comparative analysis of various HQNN algorithms, namely Quantum Convolution Neural Network (QCNN), Quanvolutional Neural Network (QuanNN), and Quantum Transfer Learning (QTL), for image classification tasks. We evaluate the performance of each algorithm across quantum circuits with different entangling structures, variations in layer count, and optimal placement in the architecture. Subsequently, we select the highest-performing architectures and assess their robustness against noise influence by introducing quantum gate noise through Phase Flip, Bit Flip, Phase Damping, Amplitude Damping, and the Depolarizing Channel. Our results reveal that the top-performing models exhibit varying resilience to different noise gates. However, in most scenarios, the QuanNN demonstrates greater robustness across various quantum noise channels, consistently outperforming other models. This highlights the importance of tailoring model selection to specific noise environments in NISQ devices.
uantum computing offers the potential to solve selected computational problems more efficiently than classical systems by leveraging quantum mechanical principles such as superposition and entanglement. However, current quantum devices operate in the noisy intermediatescale quantum (NISQ) regime, where limited coherence times, gate errors, measurement instability, and hardware variability significantly constrain practical performance. As a result, many quantum machine learning architectures that appear promising under idealized simulation conditions experience substantial degradation when executed under realistic noisy environments. This thesis investigates the problem of robustness in hybrid quantum neural network (HQNN) systems operating under realistic NISQ conditions. Rather than focusing primarily on quantum expressivity or claims of quantum advantage, the work examines whether practical hybrid quantum learning can maintain stable optimization and reliable inference in the presence of stochastic perturbations. A robustness-engineering framework is developed that integrates learned-readout decoding, multi-observable quantum feature extraction, architecture-level optimization, stability-aware training, and noise-augmented learning within a unified hybrid quantum-classical pipeline. To evaluate the framework, a comprehensive benchmarking methodology is developed across multiple datasets, architectures, perturbation environments, software frameworks, and hardware platforms. The experiments compare classical machine learning models, quantum kernel methods, and several HQNN architectures, including quanvolutional neural networks, quantum convolutional neural networks, and quantum transfer learning systems. Performance is evaluated under both noiseless and noisy conditions using standardized metrics, cross-noise validation, architecture-level comparisons, and real IBM Quantum hardware execution. The results demonstrate that baseline HQNN systems are highly sensitive to optimization instability, parity-based information loss, measurement variability, and perturbation accumulation. The experiments further reveal that robustness, rather than representational expressivity alone, is the dominant factor limiting practical hybrid quantum learning under realistic NISQ conditions. Through successive robustness-engineering stages, noisy performance improves from approximately 0.37 to 0.50 in baseline architectures to approximately 0.97 under several benchmark environments while maintaining substantially improved stability and reduced degradation under perturbation. These findings establish robustness as a central design objective for practical quantum machine learning. The thesis demonstrates that reliable hybrid quantum learning emerges through coordinated interaction between quantum feature generation, adaptive classical inference, stability-aware optimization, and hardware-aware architecture design. More broadly, the results suggest that hybrid quantum-AI systems are most effective when viewed as integrated quantum-classical computational frameworks in which quantum circuits function as probabilistic feature generators operating within larger robustness-oriented learning pipelines.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has recently emerged as a highly promising research frontier. Within this domain, Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs),characterized by Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) at their core and featuring layers of quantum gates optimized by classical algorithms, have garnered significant attention. However, a rigorous and exhaustive evaluation of their practical performance remains largely incomplete. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of three prominent hybrid classical-quantum architectures: Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNN), Quantum Recurrent Neural Networks (QRNN), and Quantum Vision Transformers (QViT), focusing on the critical dimensions of generalization, accuracy, and robustness. Our findings provide novel insights that address previous evaluative gaps. Notably, while these models exhibit exceptional performance on low-feature datasets such as MNIST, their learning efficacy degrades significantly when transitioned to high-feature datasets. Furthermore, convolutional-based models like QCNN appear less effective on high-dimensional data than other machine learning architectures. Additionally, while all models are susceptible to adversarial noise, traditional architectures, such as recurrent and convolutional networks, demonstrate superior resilience. Conversely, in the presence of quantum noise, the transformer-based architecture proves its strength by maintaining high robustness against measurement noise, channel noise, and finite-shot effects, whereas other architectures suffer marked performance declines. These results provide a granular perspective on the current state of the field and underscore the critical importance of tailoring model selection to the constraints of contemporary Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) environments.