Quantum Gated Recurrent GAN with Gaussian Uncertainty for Network Anomaly Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum-enhanced GAN with a gating mechanism and Gaussian uncertainty for improved network anomaly detection, demonstrating high accuracy on benchmarks and successful deployment on IBM Quantum hardware.

Contribution

It presents a novel QGRU-based GAN with a multi-metric gating strategy and Gaussian uncertainty, advancing quantum anomaly detection methods on NISQ devices.

Findings

Achieved 89.43% TaF1 score on benchmark datasets.

Successfully deployed on IBM Quantum hardware with maintained performance.

Outperformed existing classical and quantum anomaly detection models.

Abstract

Anomaly detection in time-series data is a critical challenge with significant implications for network security. Recent quantum machine learning approaches, such as quantum kernel methods and variational quantum circuits, have shown promise in capturing complex data distributions for anomaly detection but remain constrained by limited qubit counts. We introduce in this work a novel Quantum Gated Recurrent Unit (QGRU)-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) employing Successive Data Injection (SuDaI) and a multi-metric gating strategy for robust network anomaly detection. Our model uniquely utilizes a quantum-enhanced generator that outputs parameters (mean and log-variance) of a Gaussian distribution via reparameterization, combined with a Wasserstein critic to stabilize adversarial training. Anomalies are identified through a novel gating mechanism that initially flags potential anomalies based on Gaussian uncertainty estimates and subsequently verifies them using a composite of critic scores and reconstruction errors. Evaluated on benchmark datasets, our method achieves a high time-series aware F1 score (TaF1) of 89.43% demonstrating superior capability in detecting anomalies accurately and promptly as compared to existing classical and quantum models. Furthermore, the trained QGRU-WGAN was deployed on real IBM Quantum hardware, where it retained high anomaly detection performance, confirming its robustness and practical feasibility on current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices.