Circa: Stochastic ReLUs for Private Deep Learning

The simultaneous rise of machine learning as a service and concerns over user privacy have increasingly motivated the need for private inference (PI). While recent work demonstrates PI is possible using cryptographic primitives, the computational overheads render it impractical. State-of-art deep networks are inadequate in this context because the source of slowdown in PI stems from the ReLU operations whereas optimizations for plaintext inference focus on reducing FLOPs. In this paper we re-think ReLU computations and propose optimizations for PI tailored to properties of neural networks. Specifically, we reformulate ReLU as an approximate sign test and introduce a novel truncation method for the sign test that significantly reduces the cost per ReLU. These optimizations result in a specific type of stochastic ReLU. The key observation is that the stochastic fault behavior is well suited for the fault-tolerant properties of neural network inference. Thus, we provide significant savings without impacting accuracy. We collectively call the optimizations Circa and demonstrate improvements of up to 4.7× storage and 3× runtime over baseline implementations; we further show that Circa can be used on top of recent PI optimizations to obtain 1.8× additional speedup.