arXiv subjects

Omer Tariq

Publications and source records attributed to Omer Tariq.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantum-Enhanced Learning Framework for Intelligent and AI-Native 6G Wireless Networks

The recent convergence of 6G wireless systems and Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) has driven the need for on-device intelligence in edge networks, where ultra-low latency, stringent energy budgets, and tight compute constraints demand novel architectures. Lightweight deep models efficiently extract local patterns but fail to capture global dependencies, while attention mechanisms do so at the expense of energy and computational cost. To bridge this gap, we introduce Quantumer, a hybrid TinyML--quantum framework that integrates multi-scale dilated convolutions and scaled dot-product attention within a lightweight transformer architecture, employing a two-stage transfer learning pipeline from Quantum Pre-Training (Quantumer-Q) to Classical Fine-Tuning (Quantumer-C). We also present QuantiblentLayer, a four-qubit variational circuit that maps compact traffic representations into measurement-based Hilbert-space features using trainable rotations and cyclic entangling operations. The circuit is used only during offline pre-training as a nonlinear embedding teacher and is removed before Quantumer-C deployment, leaving a fully classical inference model without runtime quantum execution. By transferring these quantum-assisted embeddings into an energy-efficient, lightweight transformer, Quantumer achieves strong detection performance with minimal compute and memory overhead on resource-constrained edge devices. The intrusion detection system (IDS) is used as a case study and evaluated on the Edge-IIoTset, TON IoT, and WUSTL-IIoT-2021 datasets. Quantumer-Q achieves competitive compact-model performance with 105.86K parameters, 0.4038 MB memory usage, 0.5525 MB model size, and 5.5646 MFLOPs; the INT8 Raspberry Pi 4 deployment obtains 16.8413 ms latency with a 0.6493 MB footprint. These results support training-time quantum-assisted representation learning for compact edge-deployable IDS.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Anti-Shortcut Distillation via Temporal Negative Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge distillation (KD) trains a compact student by attracting it towards a converged teacher. It is silent about which directions the teacher itself learned to suppress: repulsive and bias-aware objectives exist, but none exploits the teacher's own trajectory to identify what the student should avoid. We observe that the missing signal is already encoded in the teacher's optimization trajectory: features that an early-stage teacher emphasizes but that a converged teacher attenuates are precisely the shortcut directions worth pushing the student away from. We instantiate this observation as \textbf{A}nti-\textbf{S}hortcut \textbf{D}istillation (ASD), a push--pull KD framework that treats the converged teacher $\Tfinal$ as a positive semantic anchor and an early-checkpoint teacher $\Tearly$ as a temporal negative reference. ASD couples two losses: a temporal contrastive loss ($\Ltc$) that places the early-teacher feature as a same-sample negative against in-batch and memory-bank final-teacher features in an InfoNCE objective; and a shortcut suppression loss ($\Lss$) that penalizes student projection onto the top eigenvectors of $\E[\Dh\Dh^{\top}]$, the uncentered second-moment matrix of early-to-final feature displacements. Across 13 teacher--student pairs on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, and TinyImageNet, ASD attains the highest clean top-1 accuracy on more than 10 pairs and outperforms standard KD on 12. On CIFAR-100-C corruption robustness, ASD obtains the lowest mean Corruption Error ($86.1$\,mCE) on the most challenging cross-architecture pair (WRN-40-2$\to$ShuffleNet-V2). Mechanistic diagnostics confirm the intended geometry: the ASD student is systematically anti-aligned with the shortcut direction, while its projection onto the robust subspace is substantially larger ($0.45$ vs.\ $0.12$).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SAD-LoRA: Spectral Alignment for Low-Rank Knowledge Distillation

Distilling a fine-tuned teacher into a LoRA-adapted student is a standard recipe for parameter-efficient compression, but output-level KD does not explicitly control which rank-$r$ weight subspace the adapter occupies. We propose \textbf{SAD-LoRA} (\textbf{S}pectral \textbf{A}lignment \textbf{D}istillation), which selects this subspace from the data-weighted student-space reference update $\DWT\Sigx^{1/2}$ and maintains it during training via a differentiable principal-angle loss on $\colspan(B)$. We show that the data-weighted distillation error decomposes exactly into subspace misalignment, within-subspace coefficient mismatch, and irreducible rank residual; standard KD can affect the first term only indirectly through output gradients. On controlled synthetic problems with a flat teacher spectrum, SAD-LoRA reduces the subspace-misalignment term from $51\%$ to nearly zero and lifts final subspace alignment from $0.49$ to $1.00$. On RoBERTa-large to RoBERTa-base distillation across six GLUE tasks, SAD-LoRA improves rank efficiency: at $r{=}4$, it matches or beats the strongest included spectral baseline on five of six tasks, and at $r{=}8$ it gives the best result on SST-2 and CoLA. Ablations identify subspace alignment as the load-bearing component, while coefficient matching is auxiliary.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

NOS-Gate: Queue-Aware Streaming IDS for Consumer Gateways under Timing-Controlled Evasion

Timing and burst patterns can leak through encryption, and an adaptive adversary can exploit them. This undermines metadata-only detection in a stand-alone consumer gateway. Therefore, consumer gateways need streaming intrusion detection on encrypted traffic using metadata only, under tight CPU and latency budgets. We present a streaming IDS for stand-alone gateways that instantiates a lightweight two-state unit derived from Network-Optimised Spiking (NOS) dynamics per flow, named \emph{NOS-Gate}. NOS-Gate scores fixed-length windows of metadata features and, under a $K$-of-$M$ persistence rule, triggers a reversible mitigation that temporarily reduces the flow's weight under weighted fair queueing (WFQ). We evaluate NOS-Gate under timing-controlled evasion using an executable \emph{worlds} benchmark that specifies benign device processes, auditable attacker budgets, contention structure, and packet-level WFQ replay to quantify queue impact. All methods are calibrated label-free via burn-in quantile thresholding. Across multiple reproducible worlds and malicious episodes, at an achieved $0.1\%$ false-positive operating point, NOS-Gate attains 0.952 incident recall versus 0.857 for the best baseline in these runs. Under gating, it reduces p99.9 queueing delay and p99.9 collateral delay with a mean scoring cost of $\approx 2.09\,μ\mathrm{s}$ per flow-window on CPU.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Uncertainty-Aware and Decoder-Aligned Learning for Video Summarization

Video summarization aims to produce a compact representation of a long video by selecting a subset of temporally important segments that best reflect human preferences. This task is inherently difficult due to strong annotation subjectivity and the reliance on discrete decoding procedures, such as temporal segmentation and knapsack-based selection, during evaluation. Most existing approaches either learn deterministic importance scores that overlook these characteristics or adopt complex generative models that increase training and inference cost. In this paper, we propose VASTSum, an uncertainty-aware and decoder-aligned learning framework for video summarization that addresses both challenges within a single-pass model. The proposed method predicts probabilistic frame-level importance scores using a variational formulation, enabling explicit modeling of uncertainty arising from multi-annotator supervision. To account for subjectivity, particularly under binary annotations, we employ a supervision strategy that encourages alignment with plausible human annotation modes rather than enforcing a single consensus target. Furthermore, we introduce a decoder-aligned regularization that promotes stability of knapsack-based summary selection, reducing sensitivity to small perturbations in predicted scores. We evaluate the proposed framework on the SumMe and TVSum benchmarks using standard rank-based metrics. Experimental results show consistent and competitive Kendall and Spearman correlations across multiple data splits, demonstrating improved robustness under annotation disagreement while maintaining efficient single-forward inference. These results indicate that explicitly modeling uncertainty and aligning learning objectives with the decoding stage provide a principled alternative to both deterministic and diffusion-based video summarization methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

BARFI-Q: Quantum-Enhanced Block Attention Residual Fusion Framework for Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting in Atom Interferometry

Atom interferometry generates heterogeneous multivariate temporal streams governed by phase evolution, fringe dynamics, control variables, and auxiliary sensing measurements. Accurate forecasting of these signals is important for predictive monitoring, phase correction, and intelligent quantum sensing, but it requires effective modeling of long-range temporal dependencies and interactions among multiple sensing sources. This paper proposes BARFI-Q, a Quantum-Enhanced Block Attention Residual Fusion framework for multivariate time-series forecasting in atom interferometry. BARFI-Q integrates patch-based embedding, dual-branch temporal modeling, hierarchical fusion, adaptive block-attention residual aggregation, and a quantum feature-mapping module. Unlike conventional Transformer-based forecasting models with fixed additive residual paths, BARFI-Q adaptively reuses cross-depth information and enhances the fused latent representation through quantum feature mapping. To respect phase periodicity, the forecasting target is represented in circular space using sine and cosine components. Experiments show that BARFI-Q consistently outperforms strong baseline models across repeated runs and different historical window sizes. Fusion ablation results further confirm the benefit of jointly modeling channel-wise and spatial feature interactions. These results indicate that multiscale temporal learning, hierarchical fusion, adaptive residual routing, and quantum-enhanced latent transformation provide an effective framework for atom-interferometric time-series forecasting.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

GST-VLA: Structured Gaussian Spatial Tokens for 3D Depth-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models

VLA models encode visual observations as 2D patch tokens with no intrinsic geometric structure. We introduce GST-VLA with two contributions. First, the Gaussian Spatial Tokenizer (GST) converts frozen dense depth and frozen semantic patch features into $N_g{=}128$ anisotropic 3D Gaussian primitives, each parameterized by a metric residual mean $μ\in \mathbb{R}^3$, log-scale covariance $\log σ\in \mathbb{R}^3$, and learned opacity $α\in (0,1)$. The covariance eigenstructure encodes local surface orientation, and opacity provides per-primitive geometric confidence, both inaccessible from scalar depth. Spatial attention pooling with learned queries concentrates the fixed token budget on geometrically salient regions rather than distributing uniformly. Second, 3D Depth-Aware Chain-of-Thought (DA-CoT) reasoning supervises four structured intermediate spatial thoughts, covering 3D object grounding, grasp affordance contact geometry, pairwise metric distances, and coarse SE(3) waypoints, as explicit generation targets in the training loss. A cross-attention sublayer at every VLM transformer block provides direct access to the raw 256-primitive Gaussian field during DA-CoT generation. A 300M-parameter flow-matching action expert with mixture-of-experts feedforward sublayers decodes 7-DoF delta action chunks via conditional ODE integration, conditioned on both VLM hidden states and DA-CoT outputs through dual cross-attention. Trained with composite $\mathcal{L}_\mathrm{flow} + \mathcal{L}_\mathrm{CoT} + \mathcal{L}_\mathrm{depth}$ across three progressive stages, GST-VLA achieves 96.4% on LIBERO (+2.0%), and 80.2% on SimplerEnv (+5.4%). Ablations isolate the contribution of each GST component, each DA-CoT thought, and each training stage, confirming independent and synergistic gains concentrated on precision demanding tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Quantum-Inspired Reinforcement Learning for Secure and Sustainable AIoT-Driven Supply Chain Systems

Modern supply chains must balance high-speed logistics with environmental impact and security constraints, prompting a surge of interest in AI-enabled Internet of Things (AIoT) solutions for global commerce. However, conventional supply chain optimization models often overlook crucial sustainability goals and cyber vulnerabilities, leaving systems susceptible to both ecological harm and malicious attacks. To tackle these challenges simultaneously, this work integrates a quantum-inspired reinforcement learning framework that unifies carbon footprint reduction, inventory management, and cryptographic-like security measures. We design a quantum-inspired reinforcement learning framework that couples a controllable spin-chain analogy with real-time AIoT signals and optimizes a multi-objective reward unifying fidelity, security, and carbon costs. The approach learns robust policies with stabilized training via value-based and ensemble updates, supported by window-normalized reward components to ensure commensurate scaling. In simulation, the method exhibits smooth convergence, strong late-episode performance, and graceful degradation under representative noise channels, outperforming standard learned and model-based references, highlighting its robust handling of real-time sustainability and risk demands. These findings reinforce the potential for quantum-inspired AIoT frameworks to drive secure, eco-conscious supply chain operations at scale, laying the groundwork for globally connected infrastructures that responsibly meet both consumer and environmental needs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

QSCL-EWIL: Quantum Stochastic Contrast Learning for Enhanced WiFi-Based Indoor Localization

WiFi-based indoor localization is essential for asset tracking, healthcare monitoring, and smart buildings. However, existing systems face challenges such as data variability, environmental noise, and difficulty detecting floor and building levels, compounded by limited labeled data and high received signal strength (RSS) collection costs. This paper introduces quantum stochastic contrast learning (QSCL), a novel framework grounded in rigorous theoretical foundations. We present four theorems and one lemma that establish the probabilistic augmentation, diversity enhancement, relationship preservation, and resilience of QSCL under quantum noise, supported by formal proofs. Leveraging these foundations, QSCL utilizes quantum computing (QC) to generate strong data augmentations with stochastic perturbations, enhancing data diversity, while classical weak augmentations provide subtle variations for robust feature learning. We propose a spatial temporal adaptive attention (STAA) encoder that integrates convolutional layers with adaptive attention mechanisms to capture spatial and temporal dependencies in sequential data. Furthermore, a bidirectional contrastive loss function is introduced to capture forward and reverse relationships between augmented views, ensuring robust representations. Comprehensive evaluations on the UJIIndoorLoc and UTSIndoorLoc datasets validate QSCL, demonstrating superior performance with reduced labeled data and resilience to quantum noise such as bit-flip, dephasing, and measurement noise. The proposed framework significantly improves localization accuracy, floor and building detection, and generalizability in challenging indoor environments.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

ConvXformer: Differentially Private Hybrid ConvNeXt-Transformer for Inertial Navigation

Data-driven inertial sequence learning has revolutionized navigation in GPS-denied environments, offering superior odometric resolution compared to traditional Bayesian methods. However, deep learning-based inertial tracking systems remain vulnerable to privacy breaches that can expose sensitive training data. \hl{Existing differential privacy solutions often compromise model performance by introducing excessive noise, particularly in high-frequency inertial measurements.} In this article, we propose ConvXformer, a hybrid architecture that fuses ConvNeXt blocks with Transformer encoders in a hierarchical structure for robust inertial navigation. We propose an efficient differential privacy mechanism incorporating adaptive gradient clipping and gradient-aligned noise injection (GANI) to protect sensitive information while ensuring model performance. Our framework leverages truncated singular value decomposition for gradient processing, enabling precise control over the privacy-utility trade-off. Comprehensive performance evaluations on benchmark datasets (OxIOD, RIDI, RoNIN) demonstrate that ConvXformer surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving more than 40% improvement in positioning accuracy while ensuring $(ε,δ)$-differential privacy guarantees. To validate real-world performance, we introduce the Mech-IO dataset, collected from the mechanical engineering building at KAIST, where intense magnetic fields from industrial equipment induce significant sensor perturbations. This demonstrated robustness under severe environmental distortions makes our framework well-suited for secure and intelligent navigation in cyber-physical systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Learning to Undo: Rollback-Augmented Reinforcement Learning with Reversibility Signals

This paper proposes a reversible learning framework to improve the robustness and efficiency of value based Reinforcement Learning agents, addressing vulnerability to value overestimation and instability in partially irreversible environments. The framework has two complementary core mechanisms: an empirically derived transition reversibility measure called Phi of s and a, and a selective state rollback operation. We introduce an online per state action estimator called Phi that quantifies the likelihood of returning to a prior state within a fixed horizon K. This measure is used to adjust the penalty term during temporal difference updates dynamically, integrating reversibility awareness directly into the value function. The system also includes a selective rollback operator. When an action yields an expected return markedly lower than its instantaneous estimated value and violates a predefined threshold, the agent is penalized and returns to the preceding state rather than progressing. This interrupts sub optimal high risk trajectories and avoids catastrophic steps. By combining reversibility aware evaluation with targeted rollback, the method improves safety, performance, and stability. In the CliffWalking v0 domain, the framework reduced catastrophic falls by over 99.8 percent and yielded a 55 percent increase in mean episode return. In the Taxi v3 domain, it suppressed illegal actions by greater than or equal to 99.9 percent and achieved a 65.7 percent improvement in cumulative reward, while also sharply reducing reward variance in both environments. Ablation studies confirm that the rollback mechanism is the critical component underlying these safety and performance gains, marking a robust step toward safe and reliable sequential decision making.

cs.LG↗