SecFwT: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models Using Forward-Only Passes

Abstract: LLMs have transformed numerous fields, yet their adaptation to specialized tasks in privacy-sensitive domains, such as healthcare and finance, is constrained by the scarcity of accessible training data due to stringent privacy requirements. Secure multi-party computation (MPC)-based privacy-preserving machine learning offers a powerful approach to protect both model parameters and user data, but its application to LLMs has been largely limited to inference, as fine-tuning introduces significant computational challenges, particularly in privacy-preserving backward propagation and optimizer operations. This paper identifies two primary obstacles to MPC-based privacy-preserving fine-tuning of LLMs: (1) the substantial computational overhead of backward and optimizer processes, and (2) the inefficiency of softmax-based attention mechanisms in MPC settings. To address these challenges, we propose SecFwT, the first MPC-based framework designed for efficient, privacy-preserving LLM fine-tuning. SecFwT introduces a forward-only tuning paradigm to eliminate backward and optimizer computations and employs MPC-friendly Random Feature Attention to approximate softmax attention, significantly reducing costly non-linear operations and computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that SecFwT delivers substantial improvements in efficiency and privacy preservation, enabling scalable and secure fine-tuning of LLMs for privacy-critical applications.