Q-AGNN: Quantum-Enhanced Attentive Graph Neural Network for Intrusion Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chaudhary, Devashish, Rajasegarar, Sutharshan, Pokhrel, Shiva Raj
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chaudhary, Devashish
Rajasegarar, Sutharshan
Pokhrel, Shiva Raj
author_facet Chaudhary, Devashish
Rajasegarar, Sutharshan
Pokhrel, Shiva Raj
contents With the rapid growth of interconnected devices, accurately detecting malicious activities in network traffic has become increasingly challenging. Most existing deep learning-based intrusion detection systems treat network flows as independent instances, thereby failing to exploit the relational dependencies inherent in network communications. To address this limitation, we propose Q-AGNN, a Quantum-Enhanced Attentive Graph Neural Network for intrusion detection, where network flows are modeled as nodes and edges represent similarity relationships. Q-AGNN leverages parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) to encode multi-hop neighborhood information into a high-dimensional latent space, inducing a bounded quantum feature map that implements a second-order polynomial graph filter in a quantum-induced Hilbert space. An attention mechanism is subsequently applied to adaptively weight the quantum-enhanced embeddings, allowing the model to focus on the most influential nodes contributing to anomalous behavior. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark intrusion detection datasets demonstrate that Q-AGNN achieves competitive or superior detection performance compared to state-of-the-art graph-based methods, while consistently maintaining low false positive rates under hardware-calibrated noise conditions. Moreover, we also executed the Q-AGNN framework on actual IBM quantum hardware to demonstrate the practical operability of the proposed pipeline under real NISQ conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating quantum-enhanced representations with attention mechanisms for graph-based intrusion detection and underscore the potential of hybrid quantum-classical learning frameworks in cybersecurity applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22365
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Q-AGNN: Quantum-Enhanced Attentive Graph Neural Network for Intrusion Detection
Chaudhary, Devashish
Rajasegarar, Sutharshan
Pokhrel, Shiva Raj
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
With the rapid growth of interconnected devices, accurately detecting malicious activities in network traffic has become increasingly challenging. Most existing deep learning-based intrusion detection systems treat network flows as independent instances, thereby failing to exploit the relational dependencies inherent in network communications. To address this limitation, we propose Q-AGNN, a Quantum-Enhanced Attentive Graph Neural Network for intrusion detection, where network flows are modeled as nodes and edges represent similarity relationships. Q-AGNN leverages parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) to encode multi-hop neighborhood information into a high-dimensional latent space, inducing a bounded quantum feature map that implements a second-order polynomial graph filter in a quantum-induced Hilbert space. An attention mechanism is subsequently applied to adaptively weight the quantum-enhanced embeddings, allowing the model to focus on the most influential nodes contributing to anomalous behavior. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark intrusion detection datasets demonstrate that Q-AGNN achieves competitive or superior detection performance compared to state-of-the-art graph-based methods, while consistently maintaining low false positive rates under hardware-calibrated noise conditions. Moreover, we also executed the Q-AGNN framework on actual IBM quantum hardware to demonstrate the practical operability of the proposed pipeline under real NISQ conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating quantum-enhanced representations with attention mechanisms for graph-based intrusion detection and underscore the potential of hybrid quantum-classical learning frameworks in cybersecurity applications.
title Q-AGNN: Quantum-Enhanced Attentive Graph Neural Network for Intrusion Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22365