Adversarial attacks on hybrid classical-quantum Deep Learning models for Histopathological Cancer Detection

Abstract: We present an effective application of quantum machine learning in histopathological cancer detection. The study here emphasizes two primary applications of hybrid classical-quantum Deep Learning models. The first application is to build a classification model for histopathological cancer detection using the quantum transfer learning strategy. The second application is to test the performance of this model for various adversarial attacks. Rather than using a single transfer learning model, the hybrid classical-quantum models are tested using multiple transfer learning models, especially ResNet18, VGG-16, Inception-v3, and AlexNet as feature extractors and integrate it with several quantum circuit-based variational quantum circuits (VQC) with high expressibility. As a result, we provide a comparative analysis of classical models and hybrid classical-quantum transfer learning models for histopathological cancer detection under several adversarial attacks. We compared the performance accuracy of the classical model with the hybrid classical-quantum model using pennylane default quantum simulator. We also observed that for histopathological cancer detection under several adversarial attacks, Hybrid Classical-Quantum (HCQ) models provided better accuracy than classical image classification models.