Tract

Snips' tiny TensorFlow and ONNX inference engine.

This project used to be called tfdeploy, or Tensorflow-deploy-rust.

What ?

tract is a tensorflow-compatible inference library. It loads a Tensorflow or ONNX frozen model from the regular protobuf format, and flows data through it.

Real-time streaming support

This is a semi-experimental support for real-time applications like voice processing. In many real time voice applications, processing must happen "as you go". One can not wait for the end of the incoming audio signal to start decoding.

While Kaldi has built its inference engine around this streaming constraint, our approach to the same issue is a bit different. tract graph analyser and optimiser will reason on "streamed" tensors, in order to generate an equivalent stateful "pulsing" network that will propagate small time slices ("pulses") of data. This makes optimisation efforts on pulsing and "finite" tensor modes mutually benefit each other.

Obviously, this conversion only makes sense for a subset of operators, so not all networks can be converted to a pulse network: for instance, an aggregation (like a SoftMax) on the time dimension can only be given a value when the signal has been processed up to the end.

Status and compatibility

ONNX

As of today (feb 2019), tract passes successfully about 85% of ONNX backends tests. squeezenet, densenet121, resnet50, inception_v2 and vgg19 tests are passing.

Making a ONNX backend out of tract is on the roadmap.

TensorFlow

Even if tract is very far from supporting any arbitrary model, it can run Google Inception v3 and Snips wake word models. Missing operators are easy to add. The lack of easy to reuse test suite, and the wide diversity of operators in Tensorflow make it difficult to target a full support.

TensorFlow-Lite

TensorFlow-Lite is a TensorFlow subproject that also focuses on inference on smaller devices. It uses a precompiler to transform a TensorFlow network to its own format. It only supports a subset of operators from TensorFlow though, and is only optimised for devices with Arm Neon support.

Tract supports a wider subset of TensorFlow operators, and has been optimised for CPU of the previous generation (ARM VFP), also targetting devices in the Raspberry Pi Zero family.

Example of supported networks

Keyword spotting on Arm Cortex-M Microcontrollers

https://github.com/ARM-software/ML-KWS-for-MCU

ARM demonstrated the capabilited of the Cortex-M family by providing tutorials and pre-trained models for keyword spotting. While the exercise is ultimately meant for micro-controllers, tract can run the intermediate TensorFlow models.

For instance, on a Rasperry Pi Zero, the "CNN M" model runs in about 70 micro-seconds, and 11 micro-seconds on a Raspberry Pi 3.

Snips wake word models

https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.07684

Snips uses tract to run the wake word detectors. While earlier models were class-based and did not require any special treatment, tract pulsing capabilities made it possible to run WaveNet models efficiently enough for a Raspberry Pi Zero.

Inception v3

Device	Family	TensorFlow-lite	tract
Raspberry Pi Zero	Armv6 VFP	113s	48s
Raspberry Pi 2	Armv7 NEON	25s	9s
Raspberry Pi 3	aarch32 NEON	5s	7s

Notes:

while the Raspberry Pi 3 is an Armv8 device, this bench is running on Raspbian, an armv6 operating system, crippling the performance of both benches
there exists other benches on the internet that show better performance results for TensorFlow (not -Lite) on the Pi 3. They use all four cores of the device. Both TensorFlow-Lite and tract here have been made to run on a single-core.

Roadmap

One important guiding cross-concern: this library must cross-compile as easily as practical to small-ish devices (think 20$ boards).

nearly complete ONNX support, and wraps it as a backend
integrate other TF models to use as example, test and benches
- https://github.com/ARM-software/ML-KWS-for-MCU
- https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech
consider acting as kaldi backend

License

Note: files in the protos/tensorflow directory are copied from the TensorFlow project and are not covered by the following licence statement.

Note: files in the protos/onnx directory are copied from the ONNX project and are not covered by the following licence statement.

Apache 2.0/MIT

All original work licensed under either of

Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

isgasho / tract Goto Github PK

tract's Introduction