Date of Award
Summer 8-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Program/Concentration
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Committee Director
Chunsheng Xin
Committee Member
Hongyi Wu
Committee Member
Rui Ning
Abstract
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly integrated into critical domains, ensuring privacy-preserving model design and system deployment has become a pressing priority. Safeguarding both sensitive user data and proprietary model parameters is critical throughout the AI model and system, from data acquisition and pre-processing to model inference and deployment. However, existing privacy-preserving frameworks face several limitations, including fragmented data ownership, incomplete protection across system stages, substantial computational overhead, and poor scalability to modern architectures such as large language models. This dissertation explores a unifying optimization strategy centered on input structure design to address these challenges. The core idea is to systematically exploit the structural properties of input data, such as sparsity, alignment, batching, and modularity, to minimize redundant cryptographic operations and reduce the computational and communication costs of privacy-preserving machine learning. By adapting protocol designs to the input structure, the proposed methods improve the efficiency and scalability of secure inference and multiparty collaboration. Together, these contributions establish input structure optimization as a critical tool for building practical and robust privacy-preserving AI systems.
Rights
In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).
DOI
10.25777/aspk-r752
ISBN
9798293843152
Recommended Citation
Yizhou, Feng.
"Input Structure Based Optimization for Privacy Preserving AI Systems"
(2025). Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Thesis, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Old Dominion University, DOI: 10.25777/aspk-r752
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/ece_etds/611
ORCID
0000-0002-3520-7015
Included in
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons, Computer Engineering Commons, Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons