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Title:
Tricycle: Private Transformer Inference with Tricyclic Encodings
Authors: Lawrence Lim, Vikas Kalagi, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi
Abstract:The growing adoption of Large Language Models in privacy-sensitive domains necessitates secure inference mechanisms that preserve data confidentiality. Homomorphic encryption offers a promising pathway by enabling computation on encrypted inputs, yet existing approaches struggle to scale efficiently to full transformer models due to limitations in packing schemes, which must efficiently support a wide range of operations, including matrix multiplications, row-wise nonlinear operations, and self-attention. In this work, we present Tricycle, a framework for private transformer inference built on our novel packing scheme, called tricyclic encodings, which are designed to efficiently support these core operations. Tricyclic encodings are a generalization of bicyclic encodings, enabling privacy-preserving batch matrix multiplications with optimal multiplicative depth in order to facilitate parallelized multi-head self-attention. We optimize our matrix multiplications by incorporating Baby-Step Giant-Step optimizations to reduce ciphertext rotations and presenting new ciphertext-plaintext matrix multiplication techniques that relax prior limitations. A further contribution of our work is a lightweight and effective approach for stabilizing the softmax function via statistical max estimation. Our end-to-end implementation on a BERT-Tiny model shows that Tricycle achieves a (1.5 \times) to (3 \times) speedup over previous approaches, marking a step toward practical and scalable private LLM inference without sacrificing model fidelity.
ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1200
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