LAORAM: A Look Ahead ORAM Architecture for Training Large Embedding Tables

Rachit Rajat, Yongqin Wang, Murali Annavaram · 2023

Memory access patterns have been demonstrated to leak critical information such as security keys and a program's spatial and temporal information. This information leak poses a significant privacy challenge in machine learning models with embedding tables. Embedding tables are used to learn categorical features from training data. The address of an embedding table entry carries privacy sensitive information since the address of an entry discloses features associated with a user. Oblivious RAM (ORAM), and its enhanced variants, such as PathORAM, have emerged as viable solutions to hide leakage from memory access streams. PathORAM fetches an entire path of memory blocks for every memory fetch request, thereby leading to substantial bandwidth and performance overheads.

Read the paper · More papers on PaperTik