用阈值筛选替代排名,实现快速私密检索。
GoldenRetriever: Non-Interactive Homomorphic Encrypted Retrieval for Privacy-Preserving RAG

- 基于阈值的非交互式加密检索,避免复杂排序
- 计算量从二次方降为线性,延迟显著降低
- 适合对隐私和效率有要求的智能问答系统
检索增强生成(RAG)通过引入外部知识提升大模型性能,但现有方法多在明文上操作,存在严重隐私风险。此前的隐私保护检索虽采用同态加密(HE)和私有信息检索(PIR),但常依赖交互协议或基于排名的机制,导致高延迟与潜在信息泄露。本文提出一种基于阈值选择的非交互式加密检索框架,不进行耗时的top-k排名,而是直接筛选相似度超过预设阈值的文档,将计算复杂度从与语料库规模平方相关降至线性。我们基于CKKS同态加密实现全加密的相似度评估与文档选择,不暴露查询内容、中间分数及选中索引。为解决近似加密计算与离散分词重建间的差距,提出精度稳定的掩码极化方法,确保所选文档准确恢复。在标准检索基准上的实验表明,该方法在保持良好检索效果的同时,显著降低延迟,验证了阈值选择在可扩展安全RAG系统中的实用性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, but existing pipelines typically operate on plaintext data, raising significant privacy concerns. Prior work on privacy-preserving retrieval leverages cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption (HE) and private information retrieval (PIR), but often relies on interactive protocols or ranking-based selection mechanisms that incur high latency and potential information leakage. In this paper, we propose a practical non-interactive encrypted retrieval framework for RAG based on threshold selection. Instead of performing expensive top-$k$ ranking under encryption, our approach selects documents whose similarity scores exceed a predefined threshold, reducing computational complexity from quadratic to linear in the corpus size. We implement this design using CKKS-based homomorphic computation, enabling fully encrypted similarity evaluation and document selection without revealing query content, intermediate scores, or selected indices. To bridge the gap between approximate encrypted computation and discrete token reconstruction, we introduce a precision-stable mask polarization method that ensures accurate recovery of selected documents. Experiments on standard retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive retrieval effectiveness while significantly reducing latency compared to ranking-based encrypted methods. These results highlight threshold-based selection as a practical foundation for scalable and secure RAG systems.
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