Pith. sign in

REVIEW

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2209.04181 v1 pith:3PC6DN4M submitted 2022-09-09 cs.LG cs.AR

FLInt: Exploiting Floating Point Enabled Integer Arithmetic for Efficient Random Forest Inference

classification cs.LG cs.AR
keywords floatingpointcomparisonhardwareintegermdnamenumbersoperations
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

In many machine learning applications, e.g., tree-based ensembles, floating point numbers are extensively utilized due to their expressiveness. Nowadays performing data analysis on embedded devices from dynamic data masses becomes available, but such systems often lack hardware capabilities to process floating point numbers, introducing large overheads for their processing. Even if such hardware is present in general computing systems, using integer operations instead of floating point operations promises to reduce operation overheads and improve the performance. In this paper, we provide \mdname, a full precision floating point comparison for random forests, by only using integer and logic operations. To ensure the same functionality preserves, we formally prove the correctness of this comparison. Since random forests only require comparison of floating point numbers during inference, we implement \mdname~in low level realizations and therefore eliminate the need for floating point hardware entirely, by keeping the model accuracy unchanged. The usage of \mdname~basically boils down to a one-by-one replacement of conditions: For instance, a comparison statement in C: if(pX[3]<=(float)10.074347) becomes if((*(((int*)(pX))+3))<=((int)(0x41213087))). Experimental evaluation on X86 and ARMv8 desktop and server class systems shows that the execution time can be reduced by up to $\approx 30\%$ with our novel approach.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.