English

A Survey on Private Transformer Inference

Cryptography and Security 2024-12-12 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Transformer models have revolutionized AI, enabling applications like content generation and sentiment analysis. However, their use in Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) raises significant privacy concerns, as centralized servers process sensitive user data. Private Transformer Inference (PTI) addresses these issues using cryptographic techniques such as Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE), enabling secure model inference without exposing inputs or models. This paper reviews recent advancements in PTI, analyzing state-of-the-art solutions, their challenges, and potential improvements. We also propose evaluation guidelines to assess resource efficiency and privacy guarantees, aiming to bridge the gap between high-performance inference and data privacy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.08145,
  title  = {A Survey on Private Transformer Inference},
  author = {Yang Li and Xinyu Zhou and Yitong Wang and Liangxin Qian and Jun Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.08145},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

The manuscript is still being revised and will be continuously updated in the future

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:30:35.406Z