# MPCFormer: fast, performant and private Transformer inference with MPC

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.01452 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01452/

## Key facts

- Cited by 69 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08155/) (2020)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [Deeply-Supervised Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5185/) (2014)
- [Gazelle: A Low Latency Framework for Secure Neural Network Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05507/) (2018)
- [CrypTen: Secure Multi-Party Computation Meets Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00984/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words, What is a Video Worth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13915/) (2021)
- [OpenAttack: An Open-source Textual Adversarial Attack Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09191/) (2020)
- [Chameleon: A Hybrid Secure Computation Framework for Machine Learning Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03239/) (2018)
- [Faster CryptoNets: Leveraging Sparsity for Real-World Encrypted Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09953/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Fast Distributed Inference Serving for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05920/) (2023)
- [Offsite-Tuning: Transfer Learning without Full Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04870/) (2023)
- [Privacy in Large Language Models: Attacks, Defenses and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10383/) (2023)
- [PrivLM-Bench: A Multi-level Privacy Evaluation Benchmark for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04044/) (2023)
- [PrivacyRestore: Privacy-Preserving Inference in Large Language Models via Privacy Removal and Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01394/) (2024)
- [Cuttlefish: Low-Rank Model Training without All the Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02538/) (2023)
- [Grounding Foundation Models through Federated Transfer Learning: A General Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17431/) (2023)
- [Deconstructing The Ethics of Large Language Models from Long-standing Issues to New-emerging Dilemmas: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05392/) (2024)
- [LLMs Can Understand Encrypted Prompt: Towards Privacy-Computing Friendly Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18396/) (2023)
- [MPCViT: Searching for Accurate and Efficient MPC-Friendly Vision Transformer with Heterogeneous Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13955/) (2022)
- [Encryption-Friendly LLM Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02486/) (2024)
- [Nimbus: Secure and Efficient Two-Party Inference for Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15707/) (2024)
- [No Free Lunch Theorem for Privacy-Preserving LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20681/) (2024)
- [Does compressing activations help model parallel training?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02654/) (2023)
- [Open LLMs are Necessary for Current Private Adaptations and Outperform their Closed Alternatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05818/) (2024)
- [CipherPrune: Efficient and Scalable Private Transformer Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16782/) (2025)
- [MERGE: Fast Private Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15769/) (2023)
- [East: Efficient and Accurate Secure Transformer Framework for Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09923/) (2023)
- [SecFormer: Fast and Accurate Privacy-Preserving Inference for Transformer Models via SMPC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00793/) (2024)
- [Ditto: Quantization-aware Secure Inference of Transformers upon MPC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05525/) (2024)
- [PrivCirNet: Efficient Private Inference via Block Circulant Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14569/) (2024)
- [Comet: A Communication-efficient and Performant Approximation for Private Transformer Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17485/) (2024)
- [Activation Approximations Can Incur Safety Vulnerabilities Even in Aligned LLMs: Comprehensive Analysis and Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00840/) (2025)
- [MPC-Minimized Secure LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03561/) (2024)
- [CENTAUR: Bridging the Impossible Trinity of Privacy, Efficiency, and Performance in Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10652/) (2024)
- [PPMI: Privacy-Preserving LLM Interaction with Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17336/) (2025)
- [Token Economics for LLM Agents: A Dual-View Study from Computing and Economics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09104/) (2026)
- [PriViT: Vision Transformers for Fast Private Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04604/) (2023)
- [Optimized Layerwise Approximation for Efficient Private Inference on Fully Homomorphic Encryption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10349/) (2023)
- [ObfuscaTune: Obfuscated Offsite Fine-tuning and Inference of Proprietary LLMs on Private Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02960/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enabling private inference is crucial for many cloud inference services that are based on Transformer models. However, existing private inference solutions can increase the inference latency by more than 60x or significantly compromise the inference quality. In this paper, we design the framework MPCFORMER as a practical solution, using Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Knowledge Distillation (KD). Through extensive evaluations, we show that MPCFORMER significantly speeds up Transformer inference in MPC settings while achieving similar ML performance to the input model. On the IMDb dataset, it achieves similar performance to BERTBASE, while being 5.3x faster. On the GLUE benchmark, it achieves 97% performance of BERTBASE with a 2.2x speedup. MPCFORMER remains effective with different trained Transformer weights such as ROBERTABASE and larger models including BERTLarge. Code is available at https://github.com/MccRee177/MPCFormer.