VeilTune: Secure Fine-Tuning of Private LoRA Adapters on Public Pretrained Language Models

원문 초록

Fine-tuning public pretrained language models with lightweight adapters such as LoRA has become the mainstream way to adapt them to downstream tasks. A service provider often trains its adapter on a data owner's samples, so two assets need protection: the data owner's samples and the provider's adapter. Existing secure fine-tuning protocols protect the samples but reveal to the data owner intermediate results of every training step, such as the hidden representations or logits of its inputs. We show that a single step suffices to copy the adapter: from the hidden representations of one mini-batch of 32 samples, the data owner fits an adapter that agrees with the provider's on 99.2% of test inputs, and logits alone yield about 94%. Protecting both assets therefore requires that no value that depends on the adapter be revealed throughout training. We present VeilTune, to the best of our knowledge the first protocol that fine-tunes a pretrained language model with backpropagation entirely in secure multi-party computation (MPC). VeilTune computes only what the loss depends on, replaces generic MPC operators with training-aware nonlinear operators that stay accurate on the values that training produces, and obliviously skips the steps corrupted by truncation failures. On four few-shot tasks with RoBERTa-large, VeilTune nearly matches plaintext training and is 5.3 points more accurate on average than SecP-Tuning, the state-of-the-art secure fine-tuning protocol. On SST-2, it achieves a 3.5x end-to-end speedup and a 3.6x reduction in communication over SecP-Tuning, and 26x and 17x over full fine-tuning in MPC.