arXiv:2606.16461cs.LG2026-06

通过旋转加密隐藏状态,实现无需加密的隐私保护大模型推理。

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

论文配图:Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 客户端用秘密正交矩阵旋转嵌入向量再发送
  • 旋转后仍可正确推理,且无须额外噪声或加密
  • 实测可将令牌恢复率从35%降至1.3%,仅增0.4%困惑度

在本地运行大语言模型通常不切实际,敏感文本推理常依赖第三方服务。分裂式推理虽将分词保留在客户端,仅传输隐藏表示,但这些表示仍可通过公开嵌入表的最近邻搜索还原。本文提出一种正交混淆方法:客户端在传输前用秘密正交矩阵乘以嵌入向量。为支持任意旋转下的正确推理,引入ConjFormer——一种通过轻量级归一化(标量RMSNorm)和块状正交共轭线性权重实现精确O(d)等变性的Transformer变体。服务器在旋转基底下完成完整前向传播,始终无法观测未旋转的隐藏状态。在微调后的GPT-2与Llama 3.2 1B模型(基于PubMed数据集)上实验表明,该方法彻底消除直接余弦最近邻反演,并将前10名恢复率从超过35%降至不超过1.3%,微调后困惑度仅增加0.4%。结果表明,在架构层面强制对称性可提供无需注入噪声或复杂密码学的实用隐私保护方案。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

隐私保护Transformer加密推理对称性

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