Parameter-Efficient Quantum and Hybrid Autoencoders for One-Class Anomaly Detection

Abstract

This work investigates variational quantum autoencoders (QAE) for one-class anomaly detection under strict parametric constraints, shifting the evaluation focus from absolute performance to performance–capacity tradeoffs. We implement a pure QAE baseline and a Hybrid QAE with classical compression/decoding around a quantum latent block, comparing both against classical baselines - AE, VAE, Isolation Forest, and One-Class SVM - on the NSL-KDD and ECG5000 benchmarks. The central contribution is a fairnessoriented evaluation protocol combining standard detection metrics (AUC-ROC, AUC-PR, and F1) with a performance-density measure (AUC-ROC per 1,000 trainable parameters) and a fair-budget comparison against a compact classical AE. On NSL-KDD, the QAE baseline achieves 0.9612 AUC-ROC with only 476 parameters versus 0.9679 for a classical AE with 5,580 parameters, while attaining 2.0193 AUC-ROC/1k parameters against 0.1735 for the classical AE - an order-of-magnitude improvement in parametric efficiency. Under a fairbudget setting, the QAE baseline also surpasses the compact classical AE on NSL-KDD (0.9612 vs. 0.9405). In contrast, ECG5000 favors classical methods, indicating domain dependence rather than universal quantum advantage. Overall, quantum and hybrid autoencoders are not universally superior, but deliver competitive anomaly detection with remarkably high parametric efficiency.