cs.NIOct 23, 2026

Quantum-Classical Link Prediction on Dark Web Hyperlink Graphs

Authors: Vojtěch Novák, Radovan Rečka, Ondřej Knebl, Aktham Youssef, Ivan Zelinka

Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic. · IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, 708 00, Czech Republic. · Department of Informatics and Statistics, Marine Research Institute, Klaipeda University, Klaipeda, Lithuania.

Abstract

We analyze HTML content and hyperlinks from an offline Tor crawl containing 383 onion hosts and 2,067 directed cross-host links. The study combines semantic analysis with degree-controlled quantum--classical link prediction. Two directory groups emit 94.8% of the observed host links. Directed preferential attachment reaches ROC-AUC 0.976 with random non-edges, but falls to 0.550±0.0140.550\pm0.014 under source-conditioned target-degree matching. With disjoint training and test pairs, multimodal logistic regression reaches 0.672±0.0210.672\pm0.021, GAE 0.899±0.0160.899\pm0.016, and VGAE 0.906±0.0160.906\pm0.016. A four-qubit variational quantum classifier (VQC) comparison tests two encodings across 20 disjoint-pair graph splits under exact and 1,024-shot simulation, with classical controls using the same inputs and training examples. Its best exact mean ROC-AUC is 0.549±0.0230.549\pm0.023, compared with 0.551±0.0160.551\pm0.016 for RBF SVC and 0.573±0.0290.573\pm0.029 for a 16-parameter MLP on the same inputs and training examples. These results support predictive signal in combined graph/content features and show why degree control, feature compression, and optimization conditions matter in quantum--classical comparisons.

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