paper

Accelerating Private Large Transformers Inference through Fine-grained Collaborative Computation

arXiv:2412.16537 · doi:10.1109/TIFS.2025.3584639

Abstract

Homomorphic encryption (HE) and secret sharing (SS) enable computations on encrypted data, providing significant privacy benefits for large transformer-based models (TBM) in sensitive sectors like medicine and finance. However, private TBM inference incurs significant costs due to the coarse-grained application of HE and SS. We present FASTLMPI, a new approach to accelerate private TBM inference through fine-grained computation optimization. Specifically, through the fine-grained co-design of homomorphic encryption and secret sharing, FASTLMPI achieves efficient protocols for matrix multiplication, SoftMax, LayerNorm, and GeLU. In addition, FASTLMPI introduces a precise segmented approximation technique for differentiable non-linear, improving its fitting accuracy while maintaining a low polynomial degree. Compared to solution BOLT (S&P'24), FASTLMPI shows a remarkable 54% to 64% decrease in runtime and an impressive 72.2% reduction in communication costs.

14 Pages (with 4 Pages appendix; 14 Figures)

Accelerating Private Large Transformers Inference through Fine-grained Collaborative Computation · wovepaper