Secure two-party computation with homomorphic encryption (HE) protects data
privacy with a formal security guarantee but suffers from high communication
overhead. While previous works, e.g., Cheetah, Iron, etc, have proposed
efficient HE-based protocols for different neural network (NN) operations, they
still assume high precision, e.g., fixed point 37 bit, for the NN operations
and ignore NNs' native robustness against quantization error. In this paper, we
propose HEQuant, which features low-precision-quantization-aware optimization
for the HE-based protocols. We observe the benefit of a naive combination of
quantization and HE quickly saturates as bit precision goes down. Hence, to
further improve communication efficiency, we propose a series of optimizations,
including an intra-coefficient packing algorithm and a quantization-aware
tiling algorithm, to simultaneously reduce the number and precision of the
transferred data. Compared with prior-art HE-based protocols, e.g., CrypTFlow2,
Cheetah, Iron, etc, HEQuant achieves $3.5\sim 23.4\times$ communication
reduction and $3.0\sim 9.3\times$ latency reduction. Meanwhile, when compared
with prior-art network optimization frameworks, e.g., SENet, SNL, etc, HEQuant
also achieves $3.1\sim 3.6\times$ communication reduction.

HEQuant 是基于低精度量化感知优化的 HE 协议，在保护数据隐私的同时能够显著降低通信开销和延迟，相较于其他先前的 HE 协议和网络优化框架，HEQuant 在通信和性能方面都能取得显著的提升。