FHE-Agent: Automating CKKS Configuration for Practical Encrypted Inference via an LLM-Guided Agentic Framework

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xu, Nuo, Gong, Zhaoting, Ran, Ran, Tang, Jinwei, Wen, Wujie, Ding, Caiwen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918216238891008
author Xu, Nuo
Gong, Zhaoting
Ran, Ran
Tang, Jinwei
Wen, Wujie
Ding, Caiwen
author_facet Xu, Nuo
Gong, Zhaoting
Ran, Ran
Tang, Jinwei
Wen, Wujie
Ding, Caiwen
contents Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), particularly the CKKS scheme, is a promising enabler for privacy-preserving MLaaS, but its practical deployment faces a prohibitive barrier: it heavily relies on domain expertise. Configuring CKKS involves a tightly coupled space of ring dimensions, modulus chains, and packing layouts. Without deep cryptographic knowledge to navigate these interactions, practitioners are restricted to compilers that rely on fixed heuristics. These "one-shot" tools often emit rigid configurations that are either severely over-provisioned in latency or fail to find a feasible solution entirely for deeper networks. We present FHE-Agent, an agentic framework that automates this expert reasoning process. By coupling a Large Language Model (LLM) controller with a deterministic tool suite, FHE-Agent decomposes the search into global parameter selection and layer-wise bottleneck repair. The agents operate within a multi-fidelity workflow, pruning invalid regimes using cheap static analysis and reserving expensive encrypted evaluations for the most promising candidates. We instantiate FHE-Agent on the Orion compiler and evaluate it on standard benchmarks (MLP, LeNet, LoLa) and deeper architectures (AlexNet). FHE-Agent consistently achieves better precision and lower latency than naïve search strategies. Crucially, it automatically discovers feasible, 128-bit secure configurations for complex models where baseline heuristics and one-shot prompts fail to produce a valid setup.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18653
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FHE-Agent: Automating CKKS Configuration for Practical Encrypted Inference via an LLM-Guided Agentic Framework
Xu, Nuo
Gong, Zhaoting
Ran, Ran
Tang, Jinwei
Wen, Wujie
Ding, Caiwen
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), particularly the CKKS scheme, is a promising enabler for privacy-preserving MLaaS, but its practical deployment faces a prohibitive barrier: it heavily relies on domain expertise. Configuring CKKS involves a tightly coupled space of ring dimensions, modulus chains, and packing layouts. Without deep cryptographic knowledge to navigate these interactions, practitioners are restricted to compilers that rely on fixed heuristics. These "one-shot" tools often emit rigid configurations that are either severely over-provisioned in latency or fail to find a feasible solution entirely for deeper networks. We present FHE-Agent, an agentic framework that automates this expert reasoning process. By coupling a Large Language Model (LLM) controller with a deterministic tool suite, FHE-Agent decomposes the search into global parameter selection and layer-wise bottleneck repair. The agents operate within a multi-fidelity workflow, pruning invalid regimes using cheap static analysis and reserving expensive encrypted evaluations for the most promising candidates. We instantiate FHE-Agent on the Orion compiler and evaluate it on standard benchmarks (MLP, LeNet, LoLa) and deeper architectures (AlexNet). FHE-Agent consistently achieves better precision and lower latency than naïve search strategies. Crucially, it automatically discovers feasible, 128-bit secure configurations for complex models where baseline heuristics and one-shot prompts fail to produce a valid setup.
title FHE-Agent: Automating CKKS Configuration for Practical Encrypted Inference via an LLM-Guided Agentic Framework
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18653