Precise Approximation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Homomorphically Encrypted Data

Homomorphic encryption is one of the representative solutions to privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) classification enabling the server to classify private data of clients while guaranteeing privacy. This work focuses on PPML using word-wise fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). In order to implement deep learning on word-wise homomorphic encryption (HE), the ReLU and max-pooling functions should be approximated by some polynomials for homomorphic operations. Most of the previous studies focus on HE-friendly networks, where the ReLU and max-pooling functions are approximated using low-degree polynomials. However, for the classification of the CIFAR-10 dataset, using a low-degree polynomial requires designing a new deep learning model and training. In addition, this approximation by low-degree polynomials cannot support deeper neural networks due to large approximation errors. Thus, we propose a precise polynomial approximation technique for the ReLU and max-pooling functions. Precise approximation using a single polynomial requires an exponentially high-degree polynomial, which results in a significant number of non-scalar multiplications. Thus, we propose a method to approximate the ReLU and max-pooling functions accurately using a composition of minimax approximate polynomials of small degrees. If we replace the ReLU and max-pooling functions with the proposed approximate polynomials, well-studied deep learning models such as ResNet and VGGNet can still be used without further modification for PPML on FHE. Even pre-trained parameters can be used without retraining. We approximate the ReLU and max-pooling functions in the ResNet-152 using the composition of minimax approximate polynomials of degrees 15, 27, and 29. Then, we succeed in classifying the plaintext ImageNet dataset with 77.52% accuracy, which is very close to the original model accuracy of 78.31%.