TrustworthyQENN: A Quantum Evidential Neural Network Based on Complex-Valued Contrastive Learning for Uncertainty Pattern Classification

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection requires accurately classifying In-Distribution (ID) samples while effectively distinguishing anomalous OOD data. However, existing methodologies predominantly rely on real-valued magnitude features, neglecting the semantic richness embedded in phase information, and often lack a systematic theoretical framework for quantitively modeling uncertainty. To address this dual limitation of incomplete feature representation and insufficient uncertainty modeling, the Trustworthy Quantum Evidence Neural Network (TrustworthyQENN) is proposed, a novel framework bridging complex-valued representation learning with Generalized Quantum Evidence Theory (GQET). Specifically, Supervised Complex-Valued Contrastive Learning (SCVCL) is proposed to synchronize amplitude distributions with phase correlations, thereby enforcing high intra-class compactness and inter-class separability for ID data. A quantum evidence generation mechanism based on GQET is subsequently devised, where the OOD state is formally grounded as the quantum empty set within a Hilbert space. Furthermore, the Generalized Quantum Evidential Combination Rule (GQECR) is leveraged to fuse multi-view evidence, thereby achieving trustworthy inference. Extensive experiments on the MSTAR, EuroSAT, and FUSAR-Ship benchmarks substantiate the superiority of TrustworthyQENN, which achieves a peak AUROC of 95.94% on the MSTAR dataset while consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all evaluated scenarios.