Quantum-Informed Contrastive Learning with Dynamic Mixup Augmentation for Class-Imbalanced Expert Systems
Expert systems often operate in domains characterized by class-imbalanced tabular data, where detecting rare but critical instances is essential for safety and reliability. While conventional approaches, such as cost-sensitive learning, oversampling, and graph neural networks, provide partial solutions, they suffer from drawbacks like overfitting, label noise, and poor generalization in low-density regions. To address these challenges, we propose QCL-MixNet, a novel Quantum-Informed Contrastive Learning framework augmented with k-nearest neighbor (kNN) guided dynamic mixup for robust classification under imbalance. QCL-MixNet integrates three core innovations: (i) a Quantum Entanglement-inspired layer that models complex feature interactions through sinusoidal transformations and gated attention, (ii) a sample-aware mixup strategy that adaptively interpolates feature representations of semantically similar instances to enhance minority class representation, and (iii) a hybrid loss function that unifies focal reweighting, supervised contrastive learning, triplet margin loss, and variance regularization to improve both intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Extensive experiments on 18 real-world imbalanced datasets (binary and multi-class) demonstrate that QCL-MixNet consistently outperforms 20 state-of-the-art machine learning, deep learning, and GNN-based baselines in macro-F1 and recall, often by substantial margins. Ablation studies further validate the critical role of each architectural component. Our results establish QCL-MixNet as a new benchmark for tabular imbalance handling in expert systems. Theoretical analyses reinforce its expressiveness, generalization, and optimization robustness.