Certified Private Inference on Neural Networks via Lipschitz-Guided Abstraction Refinement⋆

Private inference on neural networks requires running all the computation on encrypted data. Unfortunately, neural networks contain a large number of non-arithmetic operations, such as ReLU activation functions and max pooling layers, which incur a high latency cost in their encrypted form. To address this issue, the majority of private inference methods replace some or all of the non-arithmetic operations with a polynomial approximation. This step introduces approximation errors that can substantially alter the output of the neural network and decrease its predictive performance. In this paper, we propose a Lipschitz-Guided Abstraction Refinement method (LiGAR), which provides strong guarantees on the global approximation error. Our method is iterative, and leverages state-of-the-art Lipschitz constant estimation techniques to produce increasingly tighter bounds on the worst-case error. At each iteration, LiGAR designs the least expensive polynomial approximation by solving the dual of the corresponding optimization problem. Our preliminary experiments show that LiGAR can easily converge to the optimum on medium-sized neural networks.