arXiv subjects

Muhammad Shafique

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad Shafique.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

FAQNAS: FLOPs-aware Hybrid Quantum Neural Architecture Search using Genetic Algorithm

Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (HQNNs), which combine parameterized quantum circuits with classical neural layers, are emerging as promising models in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. While quantum circuits are not naturally measured in floating point operations (FLOPs), most HQNNs (in NISQ era) are still trained on classical simulators where FLOPs directly dictate runtime and scalability. Hence, FLOPs represent a practical and viable metric to measure the computational complexity of HQNNs. In this work, we introduce FAQNAS, a FLOPs-aware neural architecture search (NAS) framework that formulates HQNN design as a multi-objective optimization problem balancing accuracy and FLOPs. Unlike traditional approaches, FAQNAS explicitly incorporates FLOPs into the optimization objective, enabling the discovery of architectures that achieve strong performance while minimizing computational cost. Experiments on five benchmark datasets (MNIST, Digits, Wine, Breast Cancer, and Iris) show that quantum FLOPs dominate accuracy improvements, while classical FLOPs remain largely fixed. Pareto-optimal solutions reveal that competitive accuracy can often be achieved with significantly reduced computational cost compared to FLOPs-agnostic baselines. Our results establish FLOPs-awareness as a practical criterion for HQNN design in the NISQ era and as a scalable principle for future HQNN systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Quantum vs. Classical Machine Learning: A Benchmark Study for Financial Prediction

In this paper, we present a reproducible benchmarking framework that systematically compares QML models with architecture-matched classical counterparts across three financial tasks: (i) directional return prediction on U.S. and Turkish equities, (ii) live-trading simulation with Quantum LSTMs versus classical LSTMs on the S\&P 500, and (iii) realized volatility forecasting using Quantum Support Vector Regression. By standardizing data splits, features, and evaluation metrics, our study provides a fair assessment of when current-generation QML models can match or exceed classical methods. Our results reveal that quantum approaches show performance gains when data structure and circuit design are well aligned. In directional classification, hybrid quantum neural networks surpass the parameter-matched ANN by \textbf{+3.8 AUC} and \textbf{+3.4 accuracy points} on \texttt{AAPL} stock and by \textbf{+4.9 AUC} and \textbf{+3.6 accuracy points} on Turkish stock \texttt{KCHOL}. In live trading, the QLSTM achieves higher risk-adjusted returns in \textbf{two of four} S\&P~500 regimes. For volatility forecasting, an angle-encoded QSVR attains the \textbf{lowest QLIKE} on \texttt{KCHOL} and remains within $\sim$0.02-0.04 QLIKE of the best classical kernels on \texttt{S\&P~500} and \texttt{AAPL}. Our benchmarking framework clearly identifies the scenarios where current QML architectures offer tangible improvements and where established classical methods continue to dominate.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

PatchBlock: A Lightweight Defense Against Adversarial Patches for Embedded EdgeAI Devices

Adversarial attacks pose a significant challenge to the reliable deployment of machine learning models in EdgeAI applications, such as autonomous driving and surveillance, which rely on resource-constrained devices for real-time inference. Among these, patch-based adversarial attacks, where small malicious patches (e.g., stickers) are applied to objects, can deceive neural networks into making incorrect predictions with potentially severe consequences. In this paper, we present PatchBlock, a lightweight framework designed to detect and neutralize adversarial patches in images. Leveraging outlier detection and dimensionality reduction, PatchBlock identifies regions affected by adversarial noise and suppresses their impact. It operates as a pre-processing module at the sensor level, efficiently running on CPUs in parallel with GPU inference, thus preserving system throughput while avoiding additional GPU overhead. The framework follows a three-stage pipeline: splitting the input into chunks (Chunking), detecting anomalous regions via a redesigned isolation forest with targeted cuts for faster convergence (Separating), and applying dimensionality reduction on the identified outliers (Mitigating). PatchBlock is both model- and patch-agnostic, can be retrofitted to existing pipelines, and integrates seamlessly between sensor inputs and downstream models. Evaluations across multiple neural architectures, benchmark datasets, attack types, and diverse edge devices demonstrate that PatchBlock consistently improves robustness, recovering up to 77% of model accuracy under strong patch attacks such as the Google Adversarial Patch, while maintaining high portability and minimal clean accuracy loss. Additionally, PatchBlock outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses in efficiency, in terms of computation time and energy consumption per sample, making it suitable for EdgeAI applications.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

FiD-QAE: A Fidelity-Driven Quantum Autoencoder for Credit Card Fraud Detection

Credit card fraud detection is a critical task in financial security, as fraudulent transactions are rare, highly imbalanced, and often resemble legitimate ones. A wide range of classical machine learning methods, as well as more recent quantum machine learning approaches, have been investigated to address this challenge, each providing valuable progress but also leaving open questions regarding scalability, robustness, and adaptability to evolving fraud patterns. In this work, we introduce the Fidelity-based Quantum Autoencoder (FiD-QAE), a quantum architecture that employs fidelity estimation as the decision criterion for anomaly detection. Transactions are encoded into quantum states, compressed through a variational quantum circuit, and evaluated using the SWAP test to distinguish legitimate from fraudulent transactions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of FiD-QAE, including statistical analyses, multiple performance metrics, and robustness tests under quantum noise models. The results show that FiD-QAE maintains consistent performance across different imbalance levels and preserves robustness in noisy conditions. Moreover, validation on IBM Quantum hardware backends confirms the feasibility of our approach on real devices, with outcomes consistent with simulation. These findings position quantum fidelity as a powerful criterion for anomaly detection and highlight FiD-QAE as a promising direction that complements existing classical and quantum approaches, offering robustness and generalizability for financial fraud detection in realistic environments.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Investigating Different Barren Plateaus Mitigation Strategies in Variational Quantum Eigensolver

Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) algorithms suffer from barren plateaus, where gradients vanish with system size and circuit depth. Although many mitigation strategies exist, their connection to convergence performance under different iteration budgets remains unclear. Moreover, a systematic analysis identifying which state-of-the-art mitigation techniques perform best under specific scenarios is also lacking. We benchmark four approaches, Local-Global, Adiabatic, State Efficient Ansatz (SEA), and Pretrained VQE, against standard VQE on molecular systems from 4 to 14 qubits, analyzing gradient variance up to 50 layers and convergence over 1000 iterations. Our results show that the impact of gradient preservation is iteration-dependent. In the 14-qubit BeH2 system, Pretrained VQE outperforms SEA at 100 iterations despite lower gradient variance, but SEA becomes 2.2x more accurate at 1000 iterations. For smaller systems, SEA achieves near-exact energies (H2: 10^-5 Ha, LiH: 2x10^-4 Ha) with fidelities 0.999, while standard methods plateau early. The results demonstrate that robust barren plateau mitigation depends on aligning the chosen strategy with both system size and available computational budget, rather than treating gradient variance as the sole predictor of performance.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

TrojanLoC: LLM-based Framework for RTL Trojan Localization

Hardware Trojans (HT s) are a persistent threat to integrated circuits, especially when inserted at the register-transfer level (RTL). Existing methods typically first convert the design into a graph, such as a gate-level netlist or an RTL-derived dataflow graph (DFG), and then use a graph neural network (GNN ) to obtain an embedding of that graph, which (i) loses compact RTL semantics, (ii) relies on shallow GNNs with limited receptive field, and (iii) is largely restricted to coarse, module-level binary HT detection. We propose TrojanLoC, an LLM-based framework for RTL-level HT localization. We use an RTL-finetuned LLM to derive module-level and line-level embeddings directly from RTL code, capturing both global design context and local semantics. Next, we train task-specific classifiers on these embeddings to perform module-level Trojan detection, type prediction, and fine-grained line-level localization. We also introduce TrojanInS, a large synthetic dataset of RTL designs with systematically injected Trojans from four effect-based categories, each accompanied by precise line-level annotations. Our experiments show that TrojanLoC achieves strong module-level performance, reaching 0.99 F1-score for Trojan detection, up to 0.68 higher than baseline, and 0.84 macro-F1 for Trojan-type classification. At the line level, TrojanLoc further achieves up to 0.93 macro-F1, enabling fine-grained localization of Trojan-relevant RTL lines

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

VeriDispatcher: Multi-Model Dispatching through Pre-Inference Difficulty Prediction for RTL Generation Optimization

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong performance in RTL generation, but different models excel on different tasks because of architecture and training differences. Prior work mainly prompts or finetunes a single model. What remains not well studied is how to coordinate multiple different LLMs so they jointly improve RTL quality while also reducing cost, instead of running all models and choosing the best output. We define this as the multi-LLM RTL generation problem. We propose VeriDispatcher, a multi-LLM RTL generation framework that dispatches each RTL task to suitable LLMs based on pre-inference difficulty prediction. For each model, we train a compact classifier over semantic embeddings of task descriptions, using difficulty scores derived from benchmark variants that combine syntax, structural similarity, and functional correctness. At inference, VeriDispatcher uses these predictors to route tasks to a selected subset of LLMs. Across 10 diverse LLMs on RTLLM and VerilogEval, VeriDispatcher achieves up to 18% accuracy improvement on RTLLM using only 40% of commercial calls, and on VerilogEval maintains accuracy while reducing commercial usage by 25%, enabling cost-effective, high-quality LLM deployment in hardware design automation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

NetDeTox: Adversarial and Efficient Evasion of Hardware-Security GNNs via RL-LLM Orchestration

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown promise in hardware security by learning structural motifs from netlist graphs. However, this reliance on motifs makes GNNs vulnerable to adversarial netlist rewrites; even small-scale edits can mislead GNN predictions. Existing adversarial approaches, ranging from synthesis-recipe perturbations to gate transformations, come with high design overheads. We present NetDeTox, an automated end-to-end framework that orchestrates large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) in a systematic manner, enabling focused local rewriting. The RL agent identifies netlist components critical for GNN-based reasoning, while the LLM devises rewriting plans to diversify motifs that preserve functionality. Iterative feedback between the RL and LLM stages refines adversarial rewritings to limit overheads. Compared to the SOTA work AttackGNN, NetDeTox successfully degrades the effectiveness of all security schemes with fewer rewrites and substantially lower area overheads (reductions of 54.50% for GNN-RE, 25.44% for GNN4IP, and 41.04% for OMLA, respectively). For GNN4IP, ours can even optimize/reduce the original benchmarks' area, in particular for larger circuits, demonstrating the practicality and scalability of NetDeTox.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

AudioScene: Integrating Object-Event Audio into 3D Scenes

The rapid advances in audio analysis underscore its vast potential for humancomputer interaction, environmental monitoring, and public safety; yet, existing audioonly datasets often lack spatial context. To address this gap, we present two novel audiospatial scene datasets, AudioScanNet and AudioRoboTHOR, designed to explore audioconditioned tasks within 3D environments. By integrating audio clips with spatially aligned 3D scenes, our datasets enable research on how audio signals interact with spatial context. To associate audio events with corresponding spatial information, we leverage the common sense reasoning ability of large language models and supplement them with rigorous human verification, This approach offers greater scalability compared to purely manual annotation while maintaining high standards of accuracy, completeness, and diversity, quantified through inter annotator agreement and performance on two benchmark tasks audio based 3D visual grounding and audio based robotic zeroshot navigation. The results highlight the limitations of current audiocentric methods and underscore the practical challenges and significance of our datasets in advancing audio guided spatial learning.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

SpikeVox: Towards Energy-Efficient Speech Therapy Framework with Spike-driven Generative Language Models

Speech disorders can significantly affect the patients capability to communicate, learn, and socialize. However, existing speech therapy solutions (e.g., therapist or tools) are still limited and costly, hence such solutions remain inadequate for serving millions of patients worldwide. To address this, state-of-the-art methods employ neural network (NN) algorithms to help accurately detecting speech disorders. However, these methods do not provide therapy recommendation as feedback, hence providing partial solution for patients. Moreover, these methods incur high energy consumption due to their complex and resource-intensive NN processing, hence hindering their deployments on low-power/energy platforms (e.g., smartphones). Toward this, we propose SpikeVox, a novel framework for enabling energy-efficient speech therapy solutions through spike-driven generative language model. Specifically, SpikeVox employs a speech recognition module to perform highly accurate speech-to-text conversion; leverages a spike-driven generative language model to efficiently perform pattern analysis for speech disorder detection and generates suitable exercises for therapy; provides guidance on correct pronunciation as feedback; as well as utilizes the REST API to enable seamless interaction for users. Experimental results demonstrate that SpikeVox achieves 88% confidence level on average in speech disorder recognition, while providing a complete feedback for therapy exercises. Therefore, SpikeVox provides a comprehensive framework for energy-efficient speech therapy solutions, and potentially addresses the significant global speech therapy access gap.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

IQNN-CS: Interpretable Quantum Neural Network for Credit Scoring

Credit scoring is a high-stakes task in financial services, where model decisions directly impact individuals' access to credit and are subject to strict regulatory scrutiny. While Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers new computational capabilities, its black-box nature poses challenges for adoption in domains that demand transparency and trust. In this work, we present IQNN-CS, an interpretable quantum neural network framework designed for multiclass credit risk classification. The architecture combines a variational QNN with a suite of post-hoc explanation techniques tailored for structured data. To address the lack of structured interpretability in QML, we introduce Inter-Class Attribution Alignment (ICAA), a novel metric that quantifies attribution divergence across predicted classes, revealing how the model distinguishes between credit risk categories. Evaluated on two real-world credit datasets, IQNN-CS demonstrates stable training dynamics, competitive predictive performance, and enhanced interpretability. Our results highlight a practical path toward transparent and accountable QML models for financial decision-making.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

SALAD: Systematic Assessment of Machine Unlearning on LLM-Aided Hardware Design

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer transformative capabilities for hardware design automation, particularly in Verilog code generation. However, they also pose significant data security challenges, including Verilog evaluation data contamination, intellectual property (IP) design leakage, and the risk of malicious Verilog generation. We introduce SALAD, a comprehensive assessment that leverages machine unlearning to mitigate these threats. Our approach enables the selective removal of contaminated benchmarks, sensitive IP and design artifacts, or malicious code patterns from pre-trained LLMs, all without requiring full retraining. Through detailed case studies, we demonstrate how machine unlearning techniques effectively reduce data security risks in LLM-aided hardware design.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

DRIFT: Divergent Response in Filtered Transformations for Robust Adversarial Defense

Deep neural networks remain highly vulnerable to adversarial examples, and most defenses collapse once gradients can be reliably estimated. We identify \emph{gradient consensus} -- the tendency of randomized transformations to yield aligned gradients -- as a key driver of adversarial transferability. Attackers exploit this consensus to construct perturbations that remain effective across transformations. We introduce \textbf{DRIFT} (Divergent Response in Filtered Transformations), a stochastic ensemble of lightweight, learnable filters trained to actively disrupt gradient consensus. Unlike prior randomized defenses that rely on gradient masking, DRIFT enforces \emph{gradient dissonance} by maximizing divergence in Jacobian- and logit-space responses while preserving natural predictions. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we formalize gradient consensus and provide a theoretical analysis linking consensus to transferability; (ii) we propose a consensus-divergence training strategy combining prediction consistency, Jacobian separation, logit-space separation, and adversarial robustness; and (iii) we show that DRIFT achieves substantial robustness gains on ImageNet across CNNs and Vision Transformers, outperforming state-of-the-art preprocessing, adversarial training, and diffusion-based defenses under adaptive white-box, transfer-based, and gradient-free attacks. DRIFT delivers these improvements with negligible runtime and memory cost, establishing gradient divergence as a practical and generalizable principle for adversarial defense.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

TESSER: Transfer-Enhancing Adversarial Attacks from Vision Transformers via Spectral and Semantic Regularization

Adversarial transferability remains a critical challenge in evaluating the robustness of deep neural networks. In security-critical applications, transferability enables black-box attacks without access to model internals, making it a key concern for real-world adversarial threat assessment. While Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated strong adversarial performance, existing attacks often fail to transfer effectively across architectures, especially from ViTs to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or hybrid models. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{TESSER} -- a novel adversarial attack framework that enhances transferability via two key strategies: (1) \textit{Feature-Sensitive Gradient Scaling (FSGS)}, which modulates gradients based on token-wise importance derived from intermediate feature activations, and (2) \textit{Spectral Smoothness Regularization (SSR)}, which suppresses high-frequency noise in perturbations using a differentiable Gaussian prior. These components work in tandem to generate perturbations that are both semantically meaningful and spectrally smooth. Extensive experiments on ImageNet across 12 diverse architectures demonstrate that TESSER achieves +10.9\% higher attack succes rate (ASR) on CNNs and +7.2\% on ViTs compared to the state-of-the-art Adaptive Token Tuning (ATT) method. Moreover, TESSER significantly improves robustness against defended models, achieving 53.55\% ASR on adversarially trained CNNs. Qualitative analysis shows strong alignment between TESSER's perturbations and salient visual regions identified via Grad-CAM, while frequency-domain analysis reveals a 12\% reduction in high-frequency energy, confirming the effectiveness of spectral regularization.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

HQNET: Harnessing Quantum Noise for Effective Training of Quantum Neural Networks in NISQ Era

Effective training of Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) is crucial in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, where noise accelerates the onset of barren plateaus (BPs) and limits scalability. This paper investigates how quantum noise impacts QNN trainability and demonstrates that careful selection of qubit measurement observables can mitigate these effects. We analyze PauliX, PauliY, PauliZ, and a customized Hermitian observable under both global (all-qubit measured) and local (single-qubit measured) cost functions. Our results show that with global cost function, PauliX and PauliY lead to flatter landscapes under noise, while PauliZ maintains training up to $8$ qubits before encountering BPs. The customized Hermitian observable proves most robust, enabling training up to $10$ qubits in noisy settings. For local cost function setting, PauliZ outperforms PauliX and PauliY, maintaining efficiency up to $10$ qubits. These findings highlight the importance of noise-aware observable selection, offering a practical strategy to improve QNN performance and advance quantum machine learning in noisy environments.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Evaluating Quantum Amplitude Estimation for Pricing Multi-Asset Basket Options

Accurate and efficient pricing of multi-asset basket options poses a significant challenge, especially when dealing with complex real-world data. In this work, we investigate the role of quantum-enhanced uncertainty modeling in financial pricing options on real-world data. Specifically, we use quantum amplitude estimation and analyze the impact of varying the number of uncertainty qubits while keeping the number of assets fixed, as well as the impact of varying the number of assets while keeping the number of uncertainty qubits fixed. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, we establish and validate a hybrid quantum-classical comparison framework, benchmarking quantum approaches against classical Monte Carlo simulations and Black-Scholes methods. Beyond simply computing option prices, we emphasize the trade-off between accuracy and computational resources, offering insights into the potential advantages and limitations of quantum approaches for different problem scales. Our results contribute to understanding the feasibility of quantum methods in finance and guide the optimal allocation of quantum resources in hybrid quantum-classical workflows.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

RobQFL: Robust Quantum Federated Learning in Adversarial Environment

Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) merges privacy-preserving federation with quantum computing gains, yet its resilience to adversarial noise is unknown. We first show that QFL is as fragile as centralized quantum learning. We propose Robust Quantum Federated Learning (RobQFL), embedding adversarial training directly into the federated loop. RobQFL exposes tunable axes: client coverage $γ$ (0-100\%), perturbation scheduling (fixed-$\varepsilon$ vs $\varepsilon$-mixes), and optimization (fine-tune vs scratch), and distils the resulting $γ\times \varepsilon$ surface into two metrics: Accuracy-Robustness Area and Robustness Volume. On 15-client simulations with MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, IID and Non-IID conditions, training only 20-50\% clients adversarially boosts $\varepsilon \leq 0.1$ accuracy $\sim$15 pp at $< 2$ pp clean-accuracy cost; fine-tuning adds 3-5 pp. With $\geq$75\% coverage, a moderate $\varepsilon$-mix is optimal, while high-$\varepsilon$ schedules help only at 100\% coverage. Label-sorted non-IID splits halve robustness, underscoring data heterogeneity as a dominant risk.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

FastCaps: A Design Methodology for Accelerating Capsule Network on Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Capsule Network (CapsNet) has shown significant improvement in understanding the variation in images along with better generalization ability compared to traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). CapsNet preserves spatial relationship among extracted features and apply dynamic routing to efficiently learn the internal connections between capsules. However, due to the capsule structure and the complexity of the routing mechanism, it is non-trivial to accelerate CapsNet performance in its original form on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Most of the existing works on CapsNet have achieved limited acceleration as they implement only the dynamic routing algorithm on FPGA, while considering all the processing steps synergistically is important for real-world applications of Capsule Networks. Towards this, we propose a novel two-step approach that deploys a full-fledged CapsNet on FPGA. First, we prune the network using a novel Look-Ahead Kernel Pruning (LAKP) methodology that uses the sum of look-ahead scores of the model parameters. Next, we simplify the nonlinear operations, reorder loops, and parallelize operations of the routing algorithm to reduce CapsNet hardware complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work accelerating a full-fledged CapsNet on FPGA. Experimental results on the MNIST and F-MNIST datasets (typical in Capsule Network community) show that the proposed LAKP approach achieves an effective compression rate of 99.26% and 98.84%, and achieves a throughput of 82 FPS and 48 FPS on Xilinx PYNQ-Z1 FPGA, respectively. Furthermore, reducing the hardware complexity of the routing algorithm increases the throughput to 1351 FPS and 934 FPS respectively. As corroborated by our results, this work enables highly performance-efficient deployment of CapsNets on low-cost FPGA that are popular in modern edge devices.

cs.AR↗