TreeHouse: An MLIR-based Compilation Flow for Real-Time Tree-based Inference

Tree-based ensembles stand as the prominent resource-efficient approaches for real-time inference. To optimize their performance, researchers have developed several solutions to accommodate their unique program structure, i.e., consecutive branches and eliminate the floating-point arithmetic operations, which are usually costly at the embedded computing systems. Most of them are realized at the level of source code and a standard compilation is applied subsequently. Therefore, an end-to-end compilation flow may consolidate these methods and provide a holistic optimization. In this work, we introduce TreeHouse, a compilation flow based on MLIR designed for real-time inference of tree ensembles. First, we optimize the layout of basic blocks to reduce the expected branches during inference. Moreover, we provide a solution to facilitate LLVM register allocation for further efficiency. In addressing the suboptimal performance of floating-point operations in edge systems, we incorporate methods to convert data into integer format. We implemented and evaluated TreeHouse using two tree-based ensembles: boosting trees and random forests. Overall, boosting trees exhibited performance gains ranging from 1.38 × to 8.24 × on x86, 1.70 × to 6.61 × on ARMv8, and 1.75 × to 4.52 × on RISC-V compared to state-of-the-art decision tree research. Random forests achieved performance gains of up to 1.6 × on x86, 2.03 × on ARMv8, and 2.9 × on RISC-V.