Compiling KB-Sized Machine Learning Models to Tiny IoT Devices

  • Sridhar Gopinath ,
  • Nikhil Ghanathe ,
  • Vivek Seshadri ,
  • Rahul Sharma

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Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have produced KiloByte-size models that can directly run on constrained IoT devices. This approach avoids expensive communication between IoT devices and the cloud, thereby enabling energy-efficient real-time analytics. However, ML models are expressed typically in floating-point, and IoT hardware typically does not support floating-point. Therefore, running these models on IoT devices requires simulating IEEE-754 floating-point using software, which is very inefficient. We present SeeDot, a domain-specific language to express ML inference algorithms and a compiler that compiles SeeDot programs to fixed-point code that can efficiently run on constrained IoT devices. We propose 1) a novel compilation strategy that reduces the search space for some key parameters used in the fixed-point code, and 2) new efficient implementations of expensive operations. SeeDot compiles state-of-the-art KB-sized models to various microcontrollers and low-end FPGAs. We show that SeeDot outperforms 1) software emulation of floating-point (Arduino), 2) high bitwidth fixed-point (MATLAB), 3) post-training quantization (TensorFlow-Lite), and 4) floating- and fixed-point FPGA implementations generated using high-level synthesis tools.

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SeeDot

SeeDot is an automatic quantization tool that generates efficient machine learning (ML) inference code for IoT devices. ML models are usually expressed in floating-point, and IoT devices typically lack hardware support for floating-point arithmetic. Hence, running such ML models on IoT devices involves simulating floating-point arithmetic in software, which is very inefficient. SeeDot addresses this issue by generating fixed-point code with only integer operations. To enable this, SeeDot takes as input trained floating-point models (like Bonsai or ProtoNN) and generates efficient fixed-point code that can run on microcontrollers. The SeeDot compiler uses novel compilation techniques like automatically inferring certain parameters used in the fixed-point code, optimized exponentiation computation, etc. With these techniques, the generated fixed-point code has comparable classification accuracy and performs significantly faster than the floating-point code.

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