Network and Compiler Optimizations for Efficient Linear Algebra Kernels in Private Transformer Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Garimella, Karthik, Neda, Negar, Ebel, Austin, Jha, Nandan Kumar, Reagen, Brandon
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Garimella, Karthik
Neda, Negar
Ebel, Austin
Jha, Nandan Kumar
Reagen, Brandon
author_facet Garimella, Karthik
Neda, Negar
Ebel, Austin
Jha, Nandan Kumar
Reagen, Brandon
contents Large language model (LLM) based services are primarily structured as client-server interactions, with clients sending queries directly to cloud providers that host LLMs. This approach currently compromises data privacy as all queries must be processed in the cloud and in the clear. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a solution to this data privacy issue by enabling computations directly upon encrypted queries. However, running encrypted transformer inference is challenging as programmers must map standard kernels to the constrained instruction set provided by FHE. In this work, we explore implementations of linear algebra kernels needed for transformer inference in FHE and understand how network optimization can help mitigate FHE costs while remaining performant. We leverage the Orion PyTorch to FHE framework to benchmark several linear algebra kernels in order to profile two linear transformation methods, packed row and BSGS, and find that BSGS outperforms packed row methods by up to $13.7 \times$ at transformer-level scales. We also incorporate network-level pruning strategies that reduce FHE runtimes of feed forward layers by up to $11.46\times$. Furthermore, we extend Orion to include ciphertext-ciphertext matrix-matrix products, a key component in the self-attention blocks. Finally, we perform a roofline analysis of FHE primitives and encrypted linear transformations and find that (SIMD encoded) implementations are memory-bound with primitives having roughly $0.1$ integer operations per byte of DRAM traffic. These findings illustrate the need for exploring alternative encoding schemes and models of computation within CKKS to unlock scalable private transformer inference. We conduct all experiments using the Orion framework which can be found at: https://github.com/baahl-nyu/orion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11135
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Network and Compiler Optimizations for Efficient Linear Algebra Kernels in Private Transformer Inference
Garimella, Karthik
Neda, Negar
Ebel, Austin
Jha, Nandan Kumar
Reagen, Brandon
Cryptography and Security
Large language model (LLM) based services are primarily structured as client-server interactions, with clients sending queries directly to cloud providers that host LLMs. This approach currently compromises data privacy as all queries must be processed in the cloud and in the clear. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a solution to this data privacy issue by enabling computations directly upon encrypted queries. However, running encrypted transformer inference is challenging as programmers must map standard kernels to the constrained instruction set provided by FHE. In this work, we explore implementations of linear algebra kernels needed for transformer inference in FHE and understand how network optimization can help mitigate FHE costs while remaining performant. We leverage the Orion PyTorch to FHE framework to benchmark several linear algebra kernels in order to profile two linear transformation methods, packed row and BSGS, and find that BSGS outperforms packed row methods by up to $13.7 \times$ at transformer-level scales. We also incorporate network-level pruning strategies that reduce FHE runtimes of feed forward layers by up to $11.46\times$. Furthermore, we extend Orion to include ciphertext-ciphertext matrix-matrix products, a key component in the self-attention blocks. Finally, we perform a roofline analysis of FHE primitives and encrypted linear transformations and find that (SIMD encoded) implementations are memory-bound with primitives having roughly $0.1$ integer operations per byte of DRAM traffic. These findings illustrate the need for exploring alternative encoding schemes and models of computation within CKKS to unlock scalable private transformer inference. We conduct all experiments using the Orion framework which can be found at: https://github.com/baahl-nyu/orion.
title Network and Compiler Optimizations for Efficient Linear Algebra Kernels in Private Transformer Inference
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11135