SPA: Structure-Preserving Approximation of Gated Activations under FHE

Overview & Synopsis

Nonlinear activation evaluation remains a major bottleneck in neural inference under fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). FHE supports efficient addition and multiplication, but lacks native operations for exponential functions, reciprocals, and value-dependent selection. High-degree polynomial approximations on fixed intervals are therefore commonly used to replace nonlinear activations. They can achieve small errors but often incur substantial multiplicative depth and latency. We observe that several widely used nonlinear activations share the algebraic structure $A(x)=xg(x)$ with $g(-x)=1-g(x)$. This class includes GELU, SiLU, fixed-parameter Swish, and the scalar nonlinear branches of GEGLU/SwiGLU. We propose \SPA{} (\emph{Structure-Preserving Approximation}) to exploit this shared structure. \SPA{} retains the exact odd component $x/2$ and approximates only the even residual as a polynomial in $x^2$, yielding a comparison-free arithmetic kernel. This construction removes redundant odd degrees of freedom and enables lower-cost polynomial evaluation at a given error target. Plaintext experiments with Gemma-4-E2B and Llama-3.2-3B show that SPA largely preserves downstream task performance without weight updates. Fixed-interval CKKS benchmarks show favorable error--latency trade-offs. On $[-5,5]$, \SPA{}-balanced achieves a $3.25\times$ speedup over MOAI (ICLR'~26) for erf-GELU with comparable error. On the same interval, \SPA{}-accurate achieves $79.22\%$ lower root mean squared error (RMSE) and a $10.40\times$ speedup over Euston (S\&P'~26) for QuickGELU. For SiLU, \SPA{}-accurate achieves $19.02\%$ lower RMSE and a $2.06\times$ speedup over THOR (CCS'~25).