Fiona: Accelerating FHE Inference with Packing-Aware Ternary Weights

Yiteng Peng, Zhibo Liu, Dongwei Xiao, Shuai Wang

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables neural network inference directly on encrypted inputs, but it remains orders of magnitude slower than plaintext in- ference. Applying the server's plaintext weights to encrypted activations involves plaintext-ciphertext multiplications (PMult) and accounts for more than half of inference time in recent systems. Ternary quantization can replace these multipli- cations with additions and subtractions, but the savings rarely materialize under packed execution. A single PMult applies a weight group fixed by the packing layout and can be avoided only when all its weights share the same ternary value. Ternarizing all groups, however, largely degrades accuracy. We present FIONA, an offline optimizer that selectively ternarizes weights within a given packing layout based on the estimated effect of ternary conversion on the model's performance. FIONA encourages a shared ternary value within each weight group and retains full-precision weights for sensitive groups, so ternar- ized and full-precision paths coexist within a layer. It then compiles these hybrid operators exactly, applying common scaling factors once to accumulated inputs and reusing…