arXiv subjects

Shiva Raj Pokhrel

Publications and source records attributed to Shiva Raj Pokhrel.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Three-Pronged Spectral Control for Federated Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning

Federated parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) enables communication-efficient adaptation of large pretrained models on decentralized edge data, but it remains fragile under non-IID client heterogeneity. In low-rank adaptation (LoRA), different clients may learn locally useful but spectrally misaligned update subspaces, causing high-variance aggregation and poor global transfer. We propose TRISHUL, a spectral-control framework for robust federated PEFT. TRISHUL follows the FL no-raw-data-sharing setting but does not itself provide formal privacy guarantees. TRISHUL uses shared frozen multi-head low-rank bases to obtain algebraically exact aggregation of compact core updates, applies nuclear norm proximal shrinkage to suppress client-specific high-rank spectral components before upload, and allocates adaptation heads non-uniformly across layers using a concave water filling budget rule derived from pretrained layer capacity. Because shrinkage is performed only on small core matrices, TRISHUL adds negligible computation and no extra per-round communication over the underlying multi-head PEFT protocol. Across vision and language benchmarks, including CIFAR-100, SVHN, 20 Newsgroups, MRQA, and GLUE with LLaMA3.2-1B, TRISHUL improves convergence, stability, and final performance over federated LoRA baselines, with greater gains under stronger heterogeneity.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

A Drift Stable Quantum Federated Learning for Intelligent Services

Quantum federated learning enables distributed clients to train quantum neural networks without sharing local data, making it promising for privacy-aware intelligent services. Intelligent services in this context refer to privacy-sensitive distributed decision systems, such as fraud detection and genomic classification, where reliable and fair client-level learning is as important as the accuracy of the aggregate model. However, heterogeneous client data and noisy quantum optimization often cause unstable local updates, client drift, and unfair performance between clients. This paper proposes DUQFL-Prox, a drift-stable quantum federated learning framework based on deep-unfolded local optimization. Instead of using a fixed local optimizer, each client performs adaptive unfolded SPSA updates, while a proximal term keeps the local model close to the global model. A lightweight controller learns step-specific optimization parameters to improve post-aggregation performance. Experiments on financial fraud and genomic classification tasks show that DUQFL-Prox improves stability, generalization, and client fairness compared with standard QFL baselines. The results suggest that deep-unfolded quantum federated learning can support more reliable and fair intelligent services in heterogeneous distributed environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Unveiling TCP BBR Dominance in Starlink Internet: Experimental Insights and Analysis

This experimental study delivers a global assessment of Google's Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time-version 3 (BBR-v3) Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA) over SpaceX's Starlink network. Leveraging a strategically deployed six-city testbed across five continents, we systematically benchmark BBR-v3 against eight CCAs: Cubic, Hybla, Vegas, LeoCC, Copa, PCC, BBR-v1, and BBR-v2 under both dedicated and concurrent conditions. Our results demonstrate that BBR-v3's advantage is not aggressive bandwidth capture, but a more balanced fairness, loss, and delay trade-off over the Starlink Internet. We develop pragmatic mathematical models that capture Starlink's complex network dynamics and characterize BBR-v3 behavior to better explain the experimental observations. Our extensive evaluation of queue buildup and fairness further demonstrates BBR-v3's capability to maximize throughput in high-latency, variable satellite environments, while maintaining a balance between aggressiveness and fairness. The findings establish BBR-v3 as a compelling CCA for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks and provide a principled analytical foundation for next generation satellite Internet transport design.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Small Language Model-based Control for BBR over Low Earth Orbit Satellite Internet

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite Internet introduces rapid path variability, intermittent capacity shifts, and non-terrestrial delay dynamics that challenge transport-layer congestion control. Although Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) achieves high throughput in such environments, its aggressive bandwidth probing can cause excessive retransmissions and unstable pacing over LEO links. This paper presents a global experimental evaluation of BBR over a SpaceX Starlink testbed spanning six geographically distributed AWS endpoints and compares its behaviour against Cubic, Vegas, and Hybla under isolated and competing traffic scenarios. The measurements show that BBR consistently delivers superior throughput but incurs significantly higher retransmission overhead, revealing a critical throughput-stability trade-off in LEO satellite Internet. To address this limitation, we propose a Small Language Model (SLM)-guided BBR adaptation framework that learns phase-safe pacing-gain decisions from real Starlink traces. The framework combines a structured BBR state encoder, LoRA-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and a constrained networking head to generate feasible pacing actions with low inference latency. Evaluation using GPT-2, T5, GPT-Neo, and SmolLM2 shows that lightweight SLMs can retain BBR's throughput advantage while substantially reducing retransmissions, with performance comparable to larger language models but at much lower computational cost.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

HantaWatch: Federated Learning for Hantavirus Genomic Surveillance

Hantavirus genomic surveillance is limited by the distribution of sequence data, non-IID source heterogeneity, and constrained expert-review capacity. We propose HantaWatch, a federated learning framework that enables laboratories and surveillance sites to collaboratively train sequence-based models without sharing raw data. HantaWatch integrates k-mer feature extraction, source-aware federated client construction, adaptive DU-FedProx optimization, surveillance-specific model selection, and prediction-only triage. Experiments on binary and multi-class tasks show that HantaWatch supports high-risk screening, outbreak-associated prediction, clade classification, and clinical-syndrome categorization while balancing predictive performance, false-negative risk, and update stability. The framework converts model output into risk scores, confidence estimates, uncertainty flags, and ranked expert-review priorities. HantaWatch therefore provides a practical federated decision-support layer for decentralized Hantavirus surveillance, supporting expert prioritization without replacing laboratory or public-health interpretation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

A Stable Aggregation Method for Quantum Federated Learning

Quantum federated learning (QFL) enables clients to train quantum neural network (QNN) models without sharing private data. We find that aggregation in QFL is unstable under heterogeneous data, unreliable communication, variable fidelity, latency, and quantum hardware noise. Moreover, QFL is non-trivially challenging because several QNN parameters are periodic angles, where Euclidean averaging often fails to capture the inherent dynamics. We develop a novel self-consistent midpoint aggregation method for stable QFL design and implementation. We combine QoS-aware client weighting, circular parameter aggregation, and bounded midpoint-based update control. We perform several angular tests and IBM real Quantum machines experiments for validation confirming our approach. Extensive evaluations and experiments on medical and financial datasets show improved stability, lower volatility, and competitive accuracy.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

TCP BBR Performance over Wi-Fi~6: AQM Impacts and Cross-Layer Insights

We evaluate TCP BBRv3 on Wi-Fi 6 home networks under modern AQM schemes using a fully wireless testbed and a simple cross-layer model linking Wi-Fi scheduling, router queueing, and BBRv3's pacing dynamics. Comparing BBR Internet traffic with CUBIC across different AQMs (FIFO, FQ-CoDel, and CAKE) for uplink, downlink, and bidirectional traffic, we find that FIFO destabilizes pacing and raises delay, often letting CUBIC dominate; FQ-CoDel restores fairness and controls latency; and CAKE delivers the best overall performance by keeping delay low and aligning BBRv3's sending and delivered rates. We also identify a Wi-Fi-specific effect where CAKE's rapid queue draining, while improving pacing alignment, can trigger brief retransmission bursts during BBRv3's bandwidth probes. These results follow from the interaction of variable Wi-Fi service rates, AQM delay control, and BBRv3's inflight limits, leading to practical guidance to use FQ-CoDel or CAKE and avoid unmanaged FIFO in home Wi-Fi, with potential for Wi-Fi-aware tuning of BBRv3's probing.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Q-AGNN: Quantum-Enhanced Attentive Graph Neural Network for Intrusion Detection

With the rapid growth of interconnected devices, accurately detecting malicious activities in network traffic has become increasingly challenging. Most existing deep learning-based intrusion detection systems treat network flows as independent instances, thereby failing to exploit the relational dependencies inherent in network communications. To address this limitation, we propose Q-AGNN, a Quantum-Enhanced Attentive Graph Neural Network for intrusion detection, where network flows are modeled as nodes and edges represent similarity relationships. Q-AGNN leverages parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) to encode multi-hop neighborhood information into a high-dimensional latent space, inducing a bounded quantum feature map that implements a second-order polynomial graph filter in a quantum-induced Hilbert space. An attention mechanism is subsequently applied to adaptively weight the quantum-enhanced embeddings, allowing the model to focus on the most influential nodes contributing to anomalous behavior. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark intrusion detection datasets demonstrate that Q-AGNN achieves competitive or superior detection performance compared to state-of-the-art graph-based methods, while consistently maintaining low false positive rates under hardware-calibrated noise conditions. Moreover, we also executed the Q-AGNN framework on actual IBM quantum hardware to demonstrate the practical operability of the proposed pipeline under real NISQ conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating quantum-enhanced representations with attention mechanisms for graph-based intrusion detection and underscore the potential of hybrid quantum-classical learning frameworks in cybersecurity applications.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

In-network Attack Detection with Federated Deep Learning in IoT Networks: Real Implementation and Analysis

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its integration with backbone networks have heightened the risk of security breaches. Traditional centralized approaches to anomaly detection, which require transferring large volumes of data to central servers, suffer from privacy, scalability, and latency limitations. This paper proposes a lightweight autoencoder-based anomaly detection framework designed for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, enabling real-time detection while minimizing data transfer and preserving privacy. Federated learning is employed to train models collaboratively across distributed devices, where local training occurs on edge nodes and only model weights are aggregated at a central server. A real-world IoT testbed using Raspberry Pi sensor nodes was developed to collect normal and attack traffic data. The proposed federated anomaly detection system, implemented and evaluated on the testbed, demonstrates its effectiveness in accurately identifying network attacks. The communication overhead was reduced significantly while achieving comparable performance to the centralized method.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Modeling Quantum Federated Autoencoder for Anomaly Detection in IoT Networks

We propose a Quantum Federated Autoencoder for Anomaly Detection, a framework that leverages quantum federated learning for efficient, secure, and distributed processing in IoT networks. By harnessing quantum autoencoders for high-dimensional feature representation and federated learning for decentralized model training, the approach transforms localized learning on edge devices without requiring transmission of raw data, thereby preserving privacy and minimizing communication overhead. The model leverages quantum advantage in pattern recognition to enhance detection sensitivity, particularly in complex and dynamic IoT network traffic. Experiments on a real-world IoT dataset show that the proposed method delivers anomaly detection accuracy and robustness comparable to centralized approaches, while ensuring data privacy.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Black-Box Auditing of Quantum Model: Lifted Differential Privacy with Quantum Canaries

Quantum machine learning (QML) promises significant computational advantages, yet models trained on sensitive data risk memorizing individual records, creating serious privacy vulnerabilities. While Quantum Differential Privacy (QDP) mechanisms provide theoretical worst-case guarantees, they critically lack empirical verification tools for deployed models. We introduce the first black-box privacy auditing framework for QML based on Lifted Quantum Differential Privacy, leveraging quantum canaries (strategically offset-encoded quantum states) to detect memorization and precisely quantify privacy leakage during training. Our framework establishes a rigorous mathematical connection between canary offset and trace distance bounds, deriving empirical lower bounds on privacy budget consumption that bridge the critical gap between theoretical guarantees and practical privacy verification. Comprehensive evaluations across both simulated and physical quantum hardware demonstrate our framework's effectiveness in measuring actual privacy loss in QML models, enabling robust privacy verification in QML systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Scaling Trust in Quantum Federated Learning: A Multi-Protocol Privacy Design

Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) promises to revolutionize distributed machine learning by combining the computational power of quantum devices with collaborative model training. Yet, privacy of both data and models remains a critical challenge. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserving QFL framework where a network of $n$ quantum devices trains local models and transmits them to a central server under a multi-layered privacy protocol. Our design leverages Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), and Analytic Quantum Gradient Descent (AQGD) to secure data preparation, model sharing, and training stages. Through theoretical analysis and experiments on contemporary quantum platforms and datasets, we demonstrate that the framework robustly safeguards data and model confidentiality while maintaining training efficiency.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Quantum Vanguard: Server Optimized Privacy Fortified Federated Intelligence for Future Vehicles

This work presents vQFL (vehicular Quantum Federated Learning), a new framework that leverages quantum machine learning techniques to tackle key privacy and security issues in autonomous vehicular networks. Furthermore, we propose a server-side adapted fine-tuning method, ft-VQFL,to achieve enhanced and more resilient performance. By integrating quantum federated learning with differential privacy and quantum key distribution (QKD), our quantum vanguard approach creates a multi-layered defense against both classical and quantum threats while preserving model utility. Extensive experimentation with industry-standard datasets (KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes) demonstrates that vQFL maintains accuracy comparable to standard QFL while significantly improving privacy guaranties and communication security. Our implementation using various quantum models (VQC, QCNN, and SamplerQNN) reveals minimal performance overhead despite the added security measures. This work establishes a crucial foundation for quantum-resistant autonomous vehicle systems that can operate securely in the post-quantum era while efficiently processing the massive data volumes (20-40TB/day per vehicle) generated by modern autonomous fleets. The modular design of the framework allows for seamless integration with existing vehicular networks, positioning vQFL as an essential component for future intelligent transportation infrastructure.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Modeling Wavelet Transformed Quantum Support Vector for Network Intrusion Detection

Network traffic anomaly detection is a critical cybersecurity challenge requiring robust solutions for complex Internet of Things (IoT) environments. We present a novel hybrid quantum-classical framework integrating an enhanced Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) with the Quantum Haar Wavelet Packet Transform (QWPT) for superior anomaly classification under realistic noisy intermediate-scale Quantum conditions. Our methodology employs amplitude-encoded quantum state preparation, multi-level QWPT feature extraction, and behavioral analysis via Shannon Entropy profiling and Chi-square testing. Features are classified using QSVM with fidelity-based quantum kernels optimized through hybrid training with simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) optimizer. Evaluation under noiseless and depolarizing noise conditions demonstrates exceptional performance: 96.67% accuracy on BoT-IoT and 89.67% on IoT-23 datasets, surpassing quantum autoencoder approaches by over 7 percentage points.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Modeling Quantum Autoencoder Trainable Kernel for IoT Anomaly Detection

Escalating cyber threats and the high-dimensional complexity of IoT traffic have outpaced classical anomaly detection methods. While deep learning offers improvements, computational bottlenecks limit real-time deployment at scale. We present a quantum autoencoder (QAE) framework that compresses network traffic into discriminative latent representations and employs quantum support vector classification (QSVC) for intrusion detection. Evaluated on three datasets, our approach achieves improved accuracy on ideal simulators and on the IBM Quantum hardware demonstrating practical quantum advantage on current NISQ devices. Crucially, moderate depolarizing noise acts as implicit regularization, stabilizing training and enhancing generalization. This work establishes quantum machine learning as a viable, hardware-ready solution for real-world cybersecurity challenges.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Lane-Frame Quantum Multimodal Driving Forecasts for the Trajectory of Autonomous Vehicles

Trajectory forecasting for autonomous driving must deliver accurate, calibrated multi-modal futures under tight compute and latency constraints. We propose a compact hybrid quantum architecture that aligns quantum inductive bias with road-scene structure by operating in an ego-centric, lane-aligned frame and predicting residual corrections to a kinematic baseline instead of absolute poses. The model combines a transformer-inspired quantum attention encoder (9 qubits), a parameter-lean quantum feedforward stack (64 layers, ${\sim}1200$ trainable angles), and a Fourier-based decoder that uses shallow entanglement and phase superposition to generate 16 trajectory hypotheses in a single pass, with mode confidences derived from the latent spectrum. All circuit parameters are trained with Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA), avoiding backpropagation through non-analytic components. In the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, the model achieves minADE (minimum Average Displacement Error) of \SI{1.94}{m} and minFDE (minimum Final Displacement Error) of \SI{3.56}{m} in the $16$ models predicted over the horizon of \SI{2.0}{s}, consistently outperforming a kinematic baseline with reduced miss rates and strong recall. Ablations confirm that residual learning in the lane frame, truncated Fourier decoding, shallow entanglement, and spectrum-based ranking focus capacity where it matters, yielding stable optimization and reliable multi-modal forecasts from small, shallow quantum circuits on a modern autonomous-driving benchmark.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Towards Adapting Federated & Quantum Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection: A Survey

This survey explores the integration of Federated Learning (FL) with Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS), with particular emphasis on deep learning and quantum machine learning approaches. FL enables collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving data privacy-a critical requirement in network security contexts where sensitive traffic data cannot be centralized. Our comprehensive analysis systematically examines the full spectrum of FL architectures, deployment strategies, communication protocols, and aggregation methods specifically tailored for intrusion detection. We provide an in-depth investigation of privacy-preserving techniques, model compression approaches, and attack-specific federated solutions for threats including DDoS, MITM, and botnet attacks. The survey further delivers a pioneering exploration of Quantum FL (QFL), discussing quantum feature encoding, quantum machine learning algorithms, and quantum-specific aggregation methods that promise exponential speedups for complex pattern recognition in network traffic. Through rigorous comparative analysis of classical and quantum approaches, identification of research gaps, and evaluation of real-world deployments, we outline a concrete roadmap for industrial adoption and future research directions. This work serves as an authoritative reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to enhance privacy, efficiency, and robustness of federated intrusion detection systems in increasingly complex network environments, while preparing for the quantum-enhanced cybersecurity landscape of tomorrow.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

QuantumShield: Multilayer Fortification for Quantum Federated Learning

In this paper, we propose a groundbreaking quantum-secure federated learning (QFL) framework designed to safeguard distributed learning systems against the emerging threat of quantum-enabled adversaries. As classical cryptographic methods become increasingly vulnerable to quantum attacks, our framework establishes a resilient security architecture that remains robust even in the presence of quantum-capable attackers. We integrate and rigorously evaluate advanced quantum and post-quantum protocols including Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), Quantum Teleportation, Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEM) and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to fortify the QFL process against both classical and quantum threats. These mechanisms are systematically analyzed and implemented to demonstrate their seamless interoperability within a secure and scalable QFL ecosystem. Through comprehensive theoretical modeling and experimental validation, this work provides a detailed security and performance assessment of the proposed framework. Our findings lay a strong foundation for next-generation federated learning systems that are inherently secure in the quantum era.

cs.CR↗