MOAI: Module-Optimizing Architecture for non-interactive secure transformer Inference

arXiv:2611.13641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Privacy concerns have been raised in Large Language Models (LLM) inference when models are deployed in Cloud Service Providers (CSP). Homomorphic encryption (HE) offers a promising solution by enabling secure inference directly over encrypted inputs. However, the high computational overhead of HE remains a major bottleneck. To address this challenge, we propose MOAI, an efficient HE-based, non-interactive framework for secure transformer inference. MOAI gains significant efficiency improvement from: (1) a novel evaluation flow that combines column and diagonal packing with consistent strategies across all layers, eliminating expensive format conversions. (2) rotation-free algorithms for Softmax and LayerNorm that significantly reduce the number of costly HE rotations, removing 2,448 HE rotations in BERT-base inference. (3) Column packing removes rotations in plaintext-ciphertext matrix multiplications and interleaved batching further reduces the rotations in ciphertext-ciphertext matrix multiplications. MOAI uses at least 1.7x fewer HE rotations compared to the state-of-the-art works across all matrix multiplications of BERT-base. As a result, we achieve a $52.8 \%$ reduction in evaluation time compared to the state-of-the-art HE-based non-interactive secure transformer inference, THOR (Moon et al., CCS 25). We then apply MOAI on the Powerformer's framework and achieve a $55.7 \%$ reduction in evaluation time compared to Powerformer (Park et al., ACL 25), which approximates Softmax and LayerNorm with simpler functions in transformer and proposes HE-based non-interactive transformer inference. We report an amortized time of 2.36 minutes per input on a single GPU environment. We show the extendibility by applying MOAI in LLaMA-3-8B. Our implementation is publicly available as open source.