SMT-AD: a scalable quantum-inspired anomaly detection approach

arXiv cs.LG / 4/9/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces SMT-AD, a scalable quantum-inspired anomaly detection method built on Superposition of Multiresolution Tensors (SMT) for efficient parallel processing.
  • SMT-AD uses Fourier-assisted feature embedding and a superposition of bond-dimension-1 matrix product operators, enabling the number of learnable parameters to scale linearly with feature size and embedding resolutions.
  • Experiments on standard benchmark datasets, including credit card transaction fraud, show anomaly detection results that are competitive with existing baseline methods even under minimal configurations.
  • The approach can reduce model weight and potentially improve performance by effectively highlighting the most relevant input features, suggesting practical benefits for deployment and interpretability.

Abstract

Quantum-inspired tensor networks algorithms have shown to be effective and efficient models for machine learning tasks, including anomaly detection. Here, we propose a highly parallelizable quantum-inspired approach which we call SMT-AD from Superposition of Multiresolution Tensors for Anomaly Detection. It is based upon the superposition of bond-dimension-1 matrix product operators to transform the input data with Fourier-assisted feature embedding, where the number of learnable parameters grows linearly with feature size, embedding resolutions, and the number of additional components in the matrix product operators structure. We demonstrate successful anomaly detection when applied to standard datasets, including credit card transactions, and find that, even with minimal configurations, it achieves competitive performance against established anomaly detection baselines. Furthermore, it provides a straightforward way to reduce the weight of the model and even improve the performance by highlighting the most relevant input features.