# AutoReP: Automatic ReLU Replacement for Fast Private Network Inference

Source: [AutoReP: Automatic ReLU Replacement for Fast Private Network Inference](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa70651e209131cea4ae07>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:25:24.889Z

Authors: Hongwu Peng, Shaoyi Huang, Tong Zhou, Yukui Luo, Chenghong Wang, Zigeng Wang, Jiahui Zhao, Xi Xie, Ang Li, Tony Geng, Kaleel Mahmood, Wujie Wen, Xiaolin Xu, Caiwen Ding

Published: 2023-08-20T02:03:50.000Z

## Abstract

The growth of the Machine-Learning-As-A-Service (MLaaS) market has highlighted clients' data privacy and security issues. Private inference (PI) techniques using cryptographic primitives offer a solution but often have high computation and communication costs, particularly with non-linear operators like ReLU. Many attempts to reduce ReLU operations exist, but they may need heuristic threshold selection or cause substantial accuracy loss. This work introduces AutoReP, a gradient-based approach to lessen non-linear operators and alleviate these issues. It automates the selection of ReLU and polynomial functions to speed up PI applications and introduces distribution-aware polynomial approximation (DaPa) to maintain model expressivity while accurately approximating ReLUs. Our experimental results demonstrate significant accuracy improvements of 6.12% (94.31%, 12.9K ReLU budget, CIFAR-10), 8.39% (74.92%, 12.9K ReLU budget, CIFAR-100), and 9.45% (63.69%, 55K ReLU budget, Tiny-ImageNet) over current state-of-the-art methods, e.g., SNL. Morever, AutoReP is applied to EfficientNet-B2 on ImageNet dataset, and achieved 75.55% accuracy with 176.1 times ReLU budget reduction.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10134>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.10134.pdf>)