Tile Tensors: A versatile data structure with descriptive shapes for homomorphic encryption

Moving from the theoretical promise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to real-world applications with realistic and acceptable time and memory figures is an on-going challenge. After choosing an appropriate FHE scheme, and before implementing privacy-preserving analytics, one needs an efficient packing method that will optimize use of the ciphertext slots, trading-off size, latency, and throughput. We propose a solution to this challenge. We describe a method for efficiently working with tensors (multi-dimensional arrays) in a system that imposes tiles, i.e., fixed-size vectors. The tensors are packed into tiles and then manipulated via operations on those tiles. We further show a novel and concise notation for describing packing details. Our method reinterprets the tiles as multi-dimensional arrays, and combines them to cover enough space to hold the tensor. An efficient summation algorithm can then sum over any dimension of this construct. We propose a descriptive notation for the shape of this data structure that describes both the original tensor and how it is packed inside the tiles. Our solution can be used to optimize the performance of various algorithms such as consecutive matrix multiplications or neural network inference with varying batch sizes. It can also serve to enhance optimizations done by homomorphic encryption compilers. We describe different applications that take advantage of this data structure through the proposed notation, experiment to evaluate the advantages through different applications, and share our conclusions.