MicroFlow: An Efficient Rust-Based Inference Engine for TinyML

TL;DR

MicroFlow is a Rust-based TinyML framework enabling efficient neural network deployment on ultra-constrained embedded devices, ensuring safety, speed, and accuracy in critical applications.

Contribution

It introduces a compiler-based inference engine in Rust that supports neural networks on devices with as little as 2kB RAM, outperforming existing solutions in speed and memory usage.

Findings

Supports deployment on 8-bit microcontrollers with 2kB RAM

Achieves faster inference with less memory than state-of-the-art solutions

Maintains accuracy comparable to existing models

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a significant interest in developing machine learning algorithms on embedded systems. This is particularly relevant for bare metal devices in Internet of Things, Robotics, and Industrial applications that face limited memory, processing power, and storage, and which require extreme robustness. To address these constraints, we present MicroFlow, an open-source TinyML framework for the deployment of Neural Networks (NNs) on embedded systems using the Rust programming language. The compiler-based inference engine of MicroFlow, coupled with Rust's memory safety, makes it suitable for TinyML applications in critical environments. The proposed framework enables the successful deployment of NNs on highly resource-constrained devices, including bare-metal 8-bit microcontrollers with only 2kB of RAM. Furthermore, MicroFlow is able to use less Flash and RAM memory than other state-of-the-art solutions for deploying NN reference models (i.e. wake-word and person detection), achieving equally accurate but faster inference compared to existing engines on medium-size NNs, and similar performance on bigger ones. The experimental results prove the efficiency and suitability of MicroFlow for the deployment of TinyML models in critical environments where resources are particularly limited.