An Enhanced Data Packing Method for General Matrix Multiplication in Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren Scheme
Xiangchen Meng, Tan Yan, Zijun Jiang, Yangdi Lyu · 2025
General Matrix-Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) stands as the most ubiquitous operation in machine learning applications. However, performing GEMM within Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is inefficient due to high computational demands and significant data migration constrained by limited bandwidth. Additionally, the inherent limitations of FHE schemes restrict the widespread application of machine learning, as standard activation functions are incompatible. This incompatibility necessitates alternative nonlinear functions, which lead to notable accuracy reductions. To address these challenges, we introduce a polynomial encoding methodology for GEMM under the Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (BFV) scheme and extend the method to inference with packing inputs and weights for different sizes. Furthermore, we design specialized hardware to accelerate the inference process through optimized scheduling between the hardware and the host system. In experiments, we implemented our hardware on an FPGA U250 platform. Compared to existing solutions, our method achieves superior performance, achieving the highest $4.22 \times$ and $3.99 \times$ speedups on MNIST and CIFAR-10.