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Nouhaila Innan

Publications and source records attributed to Nouhaila Innan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Game, Set, Quantum: Parameterized Quantum Circuit for Correlated Equilibrium in Bayesian Games

Strategic decision-making among many agents under incomplete information is central to economics, security, and multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI). Computing equilibria in such settings is challenging because the joint type-action space grows exponentially with the number of players. In binary-type, binary-action Bayesian games with $n$ players, an explicit representation over type-action profiles requires $O(2^{2n})$ entries, making direct linear-programming (LP) formulations increasingly costly as $n$ grows. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical framework for approximating Bayes correlated equilibrium (BCE) using a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC). The PQC represents the conditional distribution over joint actions using $O(nL)$ trainable parameters, where $L$ denotes the circuit depth; for the largest trained setting, $n=8$ and $L=2$, this corresponds to $48$ trainable angles. Each player count is trained independently by maximizing expected social welfare with a penalty on positive aggregated BCE obedience violations. On a strategically coupled Bayesian congestion game with $n=2,4,6,8$ players, feasible PQC solutions attain higher welfare than MCCFR and DCFR product-strategy baselines while satisfying $ε_{\max}\leq10^{-3}$, where $ε_{\max}$ denotes the maximum positive aggregated BCE obedience violation. Across five independent runs per setting, all runs are feasible for $n=2,4,6$, while four of five are feasible for $n=8$. PQC welfare remains below the exact LP optimum, with the absolute gap increasing with $n$, while classical state-vector simulation prevents PQC training beyond eight players. These results demonstrate the use of a compact PQC parameterization for approximate equilibrium computation and quantify its welfare, feasibility, and classical simulation scaling on the studied benchmark.

quant-ph

EFaaS: A Quantum-Classical Serverless Entangled Scheduler for Hybrid Variational Algorithms

As quantum computing enters the Utility Era, realizing near-term advantage relies heavily on Hybrid Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs). These algorithms require a tightly coupled, iterative loop between a classical CPU optimizer and a Quantum Processing Unit (QPU). However, current quantum cloud access models are bottlenecked by decoupled batch-queues that sever this loop, introducing massive Time-to-Next-Shot (TTNS) latency. This delay inflates convergence time from minutes to hours and exposes the computation to quantum hardware drift, degrading algorithmic fidelity. Unlike prior work that relies on resource-wasting static hardware reservations or state-oblivious, stateless functions, we propose EFaaS, a novel serverless middleware designed specifically for hybrid quantum workflows. EFaaS fundamentally departs from existing architectures by treating classical parameter optimization and quantum circuit execution as entangled, session-aware events. Our main technical innovations are threefold: (1) a Calibration-Aware placement strategy that dynamically routes circuits to QPUs with warm calibration caches, circumventing cold-start penalties, (2) a Dual-Resource Fair Queuing scheduler that maximizes quantum utilization by strictly prioritizing active iterative loops, and (3) the "EF-QuantumFuture" programming abstraction, a novel primitive enabling classical speculative execution to mask compute latency. Across the evaluated baselines, EFaaS achieves TTNS reductions of 11.4%-94.3%, QDC gains of 2.02%-15.78% points, and convergence speedups of 83.2%-98.3%, while eliminating drift penalties.

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A2QTGN: Adaptive Amplitude Quantum-Integrated Temporal Graph Network for Dynamic Link Prediction

Dynamic link prediction is important for modeling evolving interactions in social, communication, financial, and transportation networks. Classical temporal graph models capture changes over time, but they may struggle to represent rapidly evolving node-edge interactions in large dynamic graphs. We propose A2QTGN (Adaptive Amplitude Quantum-Integrated Temporal Graph Network), a hybrid quantum-classical framework that introduces adaptive amplitude encoding as a temporal embedding layer within a Temporal Graph Network. Unlike fixed quantum embeddings, the proposed module maps temporally varying node features into quantum states and selectively refreshes their amplitude representations according to the magnitude of feature change. This allows the framework to preserve stable node information, emphasize meaningful temporal variations, and reduce redundant quantum re-encoding. Across five Temporal Graph Benchmark datasets, A2QTGN achieves test area under the curve (AUC) values of up to 0.9957 and mean reciprocal rank (MRR) values of up to 0.7832, including the highest MRR among the compared baselines on tgbl-review and tgbl-flight. Ablation results further show that the adaptive quantum embedding is central to the model performance: on a 25k-event subset of tgbl-wiki, it improves test accuracy by 13.36 percentage points over always updating and by 22.44 percentage points over using no updates. The trained model is also evaluated using noisy simulations based on an IBM quantum device, followed by a smaller real-device experiment. The results show that adaptive quantum embeddings can provide effective temporal representations for dynamic link prediction while remaining executable under current quantum hardware constraints.

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Robustness Evaluation of Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks under Noise Models via System-Level Error Mitigation

Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) represent a promising direction within Quantum Machine Learning (QML), yet their realization on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices remains constrained by decoherence, gate imperfections, crosstalk, and readout errors. This study provides a systematic evaluation of noise effects and mitigation strategies in hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs). Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), Digital Dynamical Decoupling (DDD), and Layerwise Richardson Extrapolation (LRE) are integrated into end-to-end QNN training pipelines developed with PennyLane, simulated under Qiskit Aer noise models, and integrated with the Mitiq framework, while Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC) is evaluated separately under depolarizing noise due to its computational cost. Experiments conducted on the Iris dataset with five representative noise channels show that the impact of noise and the effect of mitigation are strongly dependent on the noise model and its strength. The model maintains comparatively strong performance under phase-flip and phase-damping noise, while substantial degradation is observed under high depolarizing and amplitude-damping noise. Across the evaluated mitigation methods, the observed benefits remain limited and noise-dependent: ZNE, DDD, and LRE generally follow the same degradation trends as the unmitigated baseline, while PEC shows limited gains only in the low-noise depolarizing regime. These findings highlight the need for context-specific mitigation strategies to improve the robustness of QNNs in practical NISQ settings.

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Enhancing Blood Cells Classification using Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks

Accurate classification of microscopic blood cells is still a critical task in medical image analysis, where subtle variations and limited data can challenge conventional deep learning models. As such, we investigate in this work the potential of Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Networks (HQNNs) to enhance feature representation and improve classification performance in this domain. We propose a modular architecture combining a pre-trained ResNet-50 backbone with a low-dimensional latent bottleneck and a variational quantum circuit, enabling a direct comparison between quantum-enhanced and purely classical transformation mechanisms. To isolate the contribution of the quantum component, we evaluate three architectures: a HQNN model, a Classical Matched Model with an additional nonlinear transformation layer of comparable capacity, and a baseline model without an intermediate transformation stage. Experiments conducted on two publicly available blood cell datasets, namely the Blood Cell Images dataset and the PBC dataset, demonstrate that HQNNs consistently achieve superior or more balanced performance across evaluation metrics. In the Blood Cell Images Dataset, the proposed approach improves macro F1-score by up to 3.7% compared to classical baselines, while improving the F1-score from 98.54% to 98.69% in the more challenging 8-class scenario with near-saturated performance. Additional evaluation on IBM quantum hardware shows that the model remains robust under noise, with only a modest performance degradation relative to simulated results. These results indicate that quantum feature transformations can enhance discriminative representations, particularly in challenging classification scenarios, and highlight the practical potential of HQNN models for medical imaging tasks.

cs.CV

Q-SpiRL: Quantum Spiking Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Robot Navigation

Adaptive robot navigation in dynamic environments requires policies that can reach the target reliably while producing efficient and stable trajectories. This paper presents Q-SpiRL, a quantum spiking reinforcement learning framework for obstacle-aware robot navigation. The framework develops and evaluates five agent families: tabular Q-learning, classical MLP, classical SNN, quantum-enhanced MLP (QMLP), and quantum-enhanced spiking neural network (QSNN). While all models are implemented under a unified training and evaluation pipeline, the QSNN is the central architecture of interest, as it combines spike-based temporal processing with variational quantum feature transformation. Experiments are conducted across three grid-world environments of increasing size, namely 20x20, 30x30, and 40x40, with both static and dynamic obstacles. Performance is assessed using success rate, success-weighted path length, path length, and turn rate under deterministic inference. Results show that QSNN achieves the strongest overall trade-off between task completion, trajectory efficiency, and motion smoothness, reaching up to 99% success rate while maintaining high path efficiency in the most challenging setting. Execution on IBM quantum hardware further demonstrates the feasibility of deploying the proposed hybrid policy under real-device conditions.

cs.RO

PennySynth: RAG-Driven Data Synthesis for Automated Quantum Code Generation

The growing complexity of quantum programming frameworks has exposed a critical limitation in existing large language model (LLM)-based code assistants: general-purpose models hallucinate PennyLane-specific gate names, misplace device configurations, and produce structurally invalid circuits when faced with specialized quantum coding challenges. We present PennySynth, a retrieval-augmented generation framework that addresses this gap by conditioning LLM inference on a curated knowledge base of 13,389 PennyLane instruction-code pairs, built via a three-stage extraction, verification, and deduplication pipeline over official PennyLane repositories, community GitHub sources, and QHack competition archives. PennySynth introduces a code-aware embedding strategy using st-codesearch-distilroberta-base, trained for natural-language-to-code retrieval, increasing average retrieval cosine similarity from 0.45 to 0.726 compared to a general-purpose baseline. Evaluated across 74 challenges spanning three years of the QHack competition (2022, 2023, 2024), PennySynth achieves 64%, 68%, and 52% pass@5 on QHack 2022, 2023, and 2024, respectively, improving over Claude Sonnet 4.6 without retrieval by +28, +25, and +28 percentage points. We further introduce a quantum-adapted CodeBLEU metric that upweights qml.* token patterns and show that structural code similarity and functional correctness capture distinct aspects of quantum code quality. Controlled ablations reveal that code-aware embeddings are the primary driver of retrieval performance, while dataset expansion and source composition provide additional gains when retrieval quality is sufficiently precise.

cs.CL

QSTAR: Quantum Selective Transfer with Adaptive Routing

Quantum transfer learning (QTL) is often evaluated by replacing a classical classifier with a fixed variational quantum head, but this hides a key question: when is the quantum branch actually useful? We propose QSTAR: Quantum Selective Transfer with Adaptive Routing, a selective QTL framework that keeps high-confidence classical predictions and routes only low-confidence samples to a fallback branch. Using a frozen ResNet18 backbone on Fashion-MNIST, we compare manually designed QTL heads, KetGPT-designed quantum heads, and parameter-matched classical baselines under a common data split and optimization schedule. Standard QTL heads reach at most 57.0% accuracy, while the strongest KetGPT head in the main filtered sweep reaches 78.5% accuracy and 0.785 F1-score. Although the strongest fixed classical head remains higher at 81.6%, selective routing gives the quantum branch a clearer role. On low-confidence samples, KetGPT #180 improves accuracy over a parameter-matched MLP fallback by 6.82, 4.31, and 3.03 percentage points at thresholds of 0.70, 0.80, and 0.90. At the full-system level, Adaptive KetGPT-QTL reaches 80.9% accuracy and 0.807 F1-score, outperforming the adaptive classical baseline. A separate compact-circuit ablation identifies KetGPT #160 as a stronger fixed-head candidate, reaching 81.9% accuracy with only 10 quantum parameters and 9 gates. These results suggest that architecture-searched quantum heads are most useful as targeted fallback branches for uncertain inputs rather than uniform replacements for classical classifiers.

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QuantumChain: Blockchain-Backed Quantum Federated Learning for Financial Fraud Detection

Financial fraud detection is challenged by decentralized data, severe class imbalance, and privacy constraints. This paper presents QuantumChain, a secure Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) framework that combines hybrid quantum-classical neural networks, encrypted federated aggregation, blockchain-based auditability, and quantum-secure communication. Each client trains a local hybrid model in which a variational quantum circuit is embedded between classical neural layers, while model updates are protected through homomorphic encryption, threshold secret sharing, and QKD-based keying. A permissioned blockchain records aggregation events and supports reputation-weighted trust among participants. We evaluate QuantumChain on financial transaction data using a compact, size-matched classical baseline to isolate the effect of the quantum layer. Results show that the HQNN achieves comparable accuracy while improving fraud-class recall in most settings, reaching 94.6% recall compared with 93.2% for the classical model. The Deep QLayer improves performance in full-data settings, suggesting that added circuit depth helps recover representational capacity when the shallow circuit becomes limited. Mixed-state simulations further show that the recall trend persists under non-ideal quantum evolution. In federated deployment with 10 heterogeneous clients, global accuracy increases from 97.7% to 98.8% over five rounds before stabilizing. These results show that QuantumChain can integrate depth-aware hybrid quantum models into a secure federated fraud-detection pipeline while maintaining stable global convergence.

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QLIF-CAST: Quantum Leaky-Integrate-and-Fire for Time-Series Weather Forecasting

Accurate and efficient time-series forecasting remains a challenging problem for both classical and quantum neural architectures, particularly in multivariate environmental settings. This work adapts the Quantum Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (QLIF) spiking neural network for time-series regression tasks, specifically short-term multivariate weather forecasting. We extend QLIF beyond classification and demonstrate its applicability to continuous-valued prediction problems. The QLIF-CAST model encodes neuron excitation states as single-qubit quantum superpositions, driven by R_x rotation gates and T1 relaxation decay, and is embedded within a hybrid quantum-classical recurrent architecture. We conduct two distinct evaluations. First, a controlled comparison against a parameter-matched classical LIF baseline on a multivariate weather dataset shows that QLIF-CAST achieves 15.4% lower MSE and 4.4% lower MAE, demonstrating that quantum neuronal dynamics reduce prediction error over classical equivalents. Second, a cross-domain comparative analysis with state-of-the-art quantum LSTM (QLSTM) and quantum neural network (QNN) models on air quality and wind speed benchmarks reveals that QLIF-CAST converges in up to 94% less training time, occupying a distinct position in the speed-error trade-off space. Hardware verification on IBM Marrakesh (156-qubit QPU) confirms reliable circuit execution with only 1.2% average deviation from simulation.

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Q-PhotoNAS: Hybrid Quantum Neural Architecture Search Framework on Photonic Devices

Photonic quantum computing is a promising platform for scalable quantum machine learning, but designing effective hybrid architectures remains challenging under hardware and optimization constraints. Existing approaches rely on manually tuned architectures that fail to account for the collaboration between classical preprocessing, phase encoding, and photonic circuit structure, limiting both accuracy and hardware compatibility. In this paper, we propose a neural architecture search framework for hybrid photonic quantum-classical models that combines genetic algorithm-based search with learnable quantum phase encoding to systematically explore the joint design space of classical and quantum components. Our framework encodes 19 hyperparameters across six gene groups and evolves a population of hybrid architectures using group-based crossover, per-gene mutation, and elitism, evaluating each candidate on a short training budget before full retraining of the best found design. We evaluate our framework on two image classification benchmarks, Digits and MNIST, achieving final validation accuracies of 99.44% and 98.78%, respectively, with first-principles execution time estimates on the Quandela Ascella photonic QPU projecting single-image inference at ~67 ms (Digits) and ~149 ms (MNIST). Our quantum contribution analysis further shows that the photonic layer extracts non-redundant features orthogonal to the classical pathway, providing a measurable accuracy advantage over classical-only baselines. Our results demonstrate that automated architecture search is both practical and impactful for hybrid photonic systems, opening the way for systematic design space exploration of quantum AI on photonic devices.

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PN-QNN: Harnessing Physical Noise as a Native Regularizer in Photonic Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks

Physical noise in near-term quantum hardware is usually treated as a nuisance to suppress. We ask whether it can instead act as a hardware-native regularizer for photonic hybrid quantum-classical neural networks (PHQCNNs), analogous to noise-injection regularization in classical deep learning. Using Quandela's Perceval simulator and the MerLin framework, we build PHQCNNs for Iris, Digits, and MNIST and inject Perceval's seven-parameter physical noise model directly into training. A genetic algorithm searches the six continuous noise dimensions and 1 boolean parameter to find, per dataset, the configuration maximizing validation accuracy, compared against a noiseless baseline across five seeds. GA-tuned noise yields modest accuracy gains on Iris (+0.82pp) and Digits (+1.45pp), but a clear degradation on MNIST (-1.21pp). Per-parameter sweeps show that no individual noise parameter is consistently beneficial, motivating the joint search, while a second-order loss expansion shows that physical noise induces a Tikhonov-like regularization term whose effect is dataset-dependent. Physical photonic noise can thus act as a free regularizer, but not universally.

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VQCSim: When Does Compile-Once Statevector Simulation Beat Generic Quantum Frameworks?

Hybrid quantum-classical machine learning workflows repeatedly evaluate many small parametrized circuits during training and model exploration. In this regime, framework dispatch and orchestration overhead often dominate runtime. Prior simulators accelerate execution but leave open the question of when compile-once specialization is the right choice for static variational circuits. We answer this question with VQCSim, a compile-once, PyTorch-native statevector execution path with native autograd. In a systematic MQT Bench study, VQCSim compiles all tested static circuits and provides 87.7% end-to-end semantic validation. Across a five-GPU evaluation set, VQCSim delivers pooled median speedups of 4.49x for native inference and 26.78x for native training, while retaining a 3.31x advantage under matched finite-difference training. Ablation identifies native autograd as the dominant source of acceleration (27.6x), with compile-once caching and batch vectorization contributing additional gains. The speedup trades higher GPU memory (VQCSim is memory-limited at the high end) for lower runtime. We derive a hardware-aware regime map and release vqcsim-oracle, an open-source backend selector with 91.1%-97.7% top-1 agreement (including cross-GPU transfers), enabling automatic simulator selection in QML design loops.

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Graph-Based Bayesian Optimization for Quantum Circuit Architecture Search with Uncertainty Calibrated Surrogates

Quantum circuit design is a key bottleneck for practical quantum machine learning on complex, real-world data. We present an automated framework that discovers and refines variational quantum circuits (VQCs) using graph-based Bayesian optimization with a graph neural network (GNN) surrogate. Circuits are represented as graphs and mutated and selected via an expected improvement acquisition function informed by surrogate uncertainty with Monte Carlo dropout. Candidate circuits are evaluated with a hybrid quantum-classical variational classifier on the next generation firewall telemetry and network internet of things (NF-ToN-IoT-V2) cybersecurity dataset, after feature selection and scaling for quantum embedding. We benchmark our pipeline against an MLP-based surrogate, random search, and greedy GNN selection. The GNN-guided optimizer consistently finds circuits with lower complexity and competitive or superior classification accuracy compared to all baselines. Robustness is assessed via a noise study across standard quantum noise channels, including amplitude damping, phase damping, thermal relaxation, depolarizing, and readout bit flip noise. The implementation is fully reproducible, with time benchmarking and export of best found circuits, providing a scalable and interpretable route to automated quantum circuit discovery.

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MDQEC-QAS: Meta-Decoding for Quantum Error Correction with Hardware-Aware VQC Search and Confidence-Gated Recovery

We propose a unified meta-decoding framework for quantum error correction that learns syndrome-to-recovery mappings across multiple stabilizer codes and noise settings, without requiring separate decoders for each configuration. The benchmark includes FiveQubit, Steane, Planar3x3, and Planar5x5 codes, four noise families, and five evaluation regimes: interpolation, unseen-p transfer, unseen-noise transfer, few-shot unseen-code adaptation, and few-shot held-out-size adaptation. We compare a classical Meta-MLP teacher-trained baseline with variational quantum circuit (VQC) meta-decoders selected through hardware-aware quantum architecture search over qubit count, circuit depth, and entangling topology. The Meta-MLP achieves teacher-label accuracies of 0.9993, 0.9118, 0.9342, 0.6304, and 0.7548 across the five regimes, while the hardware-aware VQC achieves 0.9400, 0.8495, 0.8415, 0.5678, and 0.7143. However, logical-level evaluation shows that high teacher-label accuracy alone is insufficient in the most challenging Planar5x5 setting. During interpolation, the raw logical-failure ratios relative to the teacher are 12.08 and 25.91 for the Meta-MLP and VQC, respectively, whereas confidence-gated fallback reduces them to 1.71 and 1.11. These results support confidence-aware selective recovery rather than unconditional teacher replacement.

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Quantum Reservoir Computing for Short-Term Power Load Forecasting in Resource-Constrained Energy Systems

Short-term load forecasting is essential for reliable energy management, but practical deployment on edge devices requires models that remain accurate under limited memory, finite measurement budgets, and hardware noise. This work proposes a hardware-efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) framework for energy load forecasting, where a fixed quantum reservoir transforms temporal input windows into high-dimensional features and only a classical Elastic Net readout is trained. To reduce deployment cost, the trained readout is compressed using post-training fixed-point quantization at bit widths from 8 to 2 bits. The framework is evaluated on the Tetouan and Spain energy load datasets under exact statevector simulation, 512-shot finite sampling, and realistic hardware-noise models from IBM FakeTorino and IBM FakeMarrakesh. Results show that 6-bit readout precision preserves full-precision forecasting performance while reducing readout memory by 81.2%. Below this point, degradation becomes dataset dependent, with Tetouan showing stronger sensitivity and Spain degrading more gradually. Hardware-noise validation further shows that the trained readout transfers to noisy reservoir states without retraining. These findings support quantized QRC as a resource-aware forecasting approach for near-term quantum time-series applications.

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QPredSGG: Hybrid Quantum Predicate Learning for Long-Tailed Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) requires relational reasoning over objects and their interactions, but performance is often limited by severe long-tail predicate imbalance. Classical SGG models frequently rely on dataset statistics, leading to biased predictions toward frequent relations rather than fine-grained semantic predicates. Although existing debiasing strategies improve mean recall, predicate classification in current frameworks still often depends on large classical decision modules with high parameter cost. This work introduces a hybrid quantum predicate classifier for SGG by replacing the classical predicate head in Causal Feature Enhancement Network (CFEN) with a Quantum Predicate Head (QP-Head) trained using weighted cross-entropy. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first studies to evaluate a hybrid quantum architecture for scene graph predicate classification on Visual Genome 150. We study the effect of qubit count, encoding strategy, entangling structure, and circuit depth on relational prediction. The best 4-qubit QP-Head uses Amplitude Embedding and Strongly Entangling Layers to compress 4096-dimensional pair features into a 16-dimensional quantum-compatible representation, corresponding to a 256$\times$ reduction. It achieves an mR@100 of 57.25%, compared with 41.1% for the classical CFEN reference, while using only 96 trainable quantum parameters. Scaling to 8 qubits maintains strong long-tail performance, reaching an mR@100 of 55.38% with 384 quantum parameters, while the depth analysis shows a trade-off between expressibility and runtime overhead. These results suggest that compact hybrid quantum predicate heads can support parameter-efficient long-tail relational classification in complex visual reasoning tasks.

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Meta-Quantum Ensemble Framework for Robust Network Intrusion Detection

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) must maintain high detection sensitivity while operating under strict false-positive constraints, a challenge intensified by class imbalance and heterogeneous IoT traffic. This work investigates whether heterogeneous quantum learners can provide useful and non-redundant decision information for IDS tasks. We study Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs) and Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs), which rely on different learning mechanisms and exhibit distinct prediction behaviors. To combine these models, we propose the System-Level Meta-Quantum Ensemble (MQE), a hybrid quantum-classical framework that fuses QSVM and QNN outputs using a Random Forest meta-learner. The meta-learner captures agreement and disagreement patterns between the quantum branches to improve prediction stability and detection performance. Experiments on TON IoT and CICIDS2017 show that MQE improves selected performance, low-FPR, and reliability metrics over several standalone quantum learners, with gains depending on the dataset, metric, and fusion representation. The results highlight meta-level fusion as a practical strategy for building more reliable QML-based IDS pipelines.

quant-ph