Primer: Fast Private Transformer Inference on Encrypted Data

Abstract: It is increasingly important to enable privacy-preserving inference for cloud services based on Transformers. Post-quantum cryptographic techniques, e.g., fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and multi-party computation (MPC), are popular methods to support private Transformer inference. However, existing works still suffer from prohibitively computational and communicational overhead. In this work, we present, Primer, to enable a fast and accurate Transformer over encrypted data for natural language processing tasks. In particular, Primer is constructed by a hybrid cryptographic protocol optimized for attention-based Transformer models, as well as techniques including computation merge and tokens-first ciphertext packing. Comprehensive experiments on encrypted language modeling show that Primer achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and reduces the inference latency by 90.6% ~ 97.5% over previous methods.