Title: Secure Inference for Diffusion Models via Unconditional Scores
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: privacy-preserving inference, diffusion models

Abstract: As diffusion model-based services expand across various domains, safeguarding client data privacy has become increasingly critical. While fully homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computation enable privacy-preserving inference, their high computational overhead poses challenges for large-scale diffusion applications. Recent work alleviates computational costs by substituting non-linear operations with low-degree polynomial approximations. While such relaxations reduce latency, they incur significant degradation in generative fidelity, and inference remains considerably slower than plaintext execution. To further accelerate secure inference while preserving performance, we explore more relaxed approximations and propose a score-correction framework that rectifies the conditional score shift induced by the relaxed approximation, rather than decreasing the approximation error itself. The key insight is that unconditional generation can be executed without approximation and thus provides a high-fidelity score signal. Leveraging this unconditional score as corrective guidance enables more relaxed approximations while preserving semantic and perceptual quality. In experiments, we demonstrate that our method significantly alleviates the performance degradation caused by relaxed approximations across various benchmarks.