Adding a Compiler Pass to Relay

Compiler passes are the primary interface for both extending Relay’s feature set and for performing optimizations on Relay programs. By writing a compiler pass, you can modify the AST or collect information about the AST, depending on your goal. Indeed, some of Relay’s most important built-in features (e.g., autodiff and type inference) are nothing more than “standard” compiler passes.

At a high level, there are two key components to writing a pass:

• Creating one or more C++ classes that traverse the program

• Wrapping the traversal implementation and its metadata in the pass manager API so it can neatly interface with the Pass Infrastructure

To begin, we’ll give an overview of the key mechanisms for writing a compiler pass. Then, we’ll walk through a concrete example of the constant-folding pass in Relay.

AST Traversers

The base class used to traverse Relay programs is ExprFunctor. The public interface it provides is a VisitExpr method that takes an expression and zero or more arguments and returns an instance of some type. When you extend this class, you define the AST traversal pattern by overriding implementations of VisitExpr_ for each type of expression.

The relation between VisitExpr and VisitExpr_ has to do with dispatch. Each VisitExpr_ definition targets a specific type of expression, but you don’t always know which node type you’ll be visiting. To remedy this, ExprFunctor provides a VisitExpr function which routes from the given expression to the VisitExpr_ case that handles it. Although C++ already provides dynamic dispatch, ExprFunctor defines its own vtable, which VisitExpr uses. By defining our own vtable, we have more control over dispatch. For example, if we wanted to define a PrintVisitor traverser that printed “Here” before every visit, we could override VisitExpr:

void PrintVisitor::VisitExpr(const Expr& expr) {
  std::cout << "Here" << std::endl;
  ExprFunctor::VisitExpr(expr);
}

ExprFunctor itself is a very general class, which is why more often than not, you will be extending ExprVisitor or ExprMutator. These classes extend ExprFunctor and provide default implementations of VisitExpr_ that capture common traversal patterns for each expression type. Having these default implementations means we only need to provide overriding implementations for the expression types where we want different behavior. We describe each subclass on its own in the following sections.

Expression Visitors

ExprVisitor is for passes that don’t modify the program and instead perform program analyses and collect information. With this class, VisitExpr and the private counterparts return nothing. The VisitExpr_ implementations provided by this class simply visit all of the expression’s fields that are expressions. The default implementation for IfNode is shown below.

void ExprVisitor::VisitExpr_(const IfNode* op) {
  this->VisitExpr(op->cond);
  this->VisitExpr(op->true_branch);
  this->VisitExpr(op->false_branch);
}

Note that we’re calling VisitExpr and not VisitExpr_ here, so we can use the vtable in ExprFunctor for routing.

Now, if we wanted to write a class CallChecker that checks if any function calls appear in the program, we would only need to extend ExprVisitor and define the following VisitExpr_ method:

void VisitExpr_(const CallNode* n) final {
  result_ = true;
}

where result_ is a field. In this case, we don’t need to further recurse on the fields of the CallNode, because result_ is already true and we now know the original expression contains a call. To make this visitor usable, we would provide the following public method:

bool Check(const Expr& expr) final {
  result_ = false;
  VisitExpr(expr);
  return result_;
}

And that’s all we need. It is very common to define a public interface that performs some bookkeeping before invoking the top-level recursion. We could of course further wrap the API by making a standalone procedure that creates a CallChecker instance and calls Check on it, but the takeaway is that we’ve achieved our goal with very little effort.

Expression Mutators

ExprMutator is for passes that transform the program in some way. With this class, VisitExpr and its private counterparts return Expr. The default VisitExpr_ implementations provided by this class visit all of the expression’s fields that are expressions and set the fields to be the result of visiting them. The default implementation for TupleGetItemNode is shown below.

Expr ExprMutator::VisitExpr_(const TupleGetItemNode* g) {
  auto t = this->Mutate(g->tuple);
  if (g->tuple == t) {
    return GetRef<Expr>(g);
  } else {
    return TupleGetItem(t, g->index);
  }
}

There are a few things to notice here. First, Mutate is an alias for VisitExpr in ExprMutator. Second, we only return a new node if the call to Mutate modified the tuple field. This method of update is called a functional update and doing so avoids unnecessary allocations.

One feature ExprMutator has that ExprVisitor doesn’t is a built-in memo_ field for caching results. It makes sense that ExprMutator has a memoizer, because we know which types of results we’re caching (i.e., Expr), whereas the visit methods of ExprVisitor don’t return anything. Usually, when we want to cache results in a subclass of ExprVisitor, we need to define the cache ourselves.

Now, if we wanted to write a class IfCollapser that replaces every if statement with its true branch, we would override VisitExpr_ for IfNode:

Expr ExprMutator::VisitExpr_(const IfNode* op) {
  return this->Mutate(op->true_branch);
}

Note that the returned expression will not necessarily be an IfNode, and this is fine, because the return type is Expr. Now, we create the public interface:

Expr CollapseIfs(const Expr& expr) final {
  return this->Mutate(expr);
}

With this mutator, we didn’t need to do any bookkeeping, but we still want to follow the convention of having a descriptive method as the interface.

Example: Constant Folding

In order to better understand the process of writing a pass, we will look at the constant folding pass (found in src/relay/transforms/fold_constant.cc) as a guide, because it is a relatively simple pass that incorporates both types of traversals.

Constant folding involves evaluating expressions in the program that only involve constant values, then replacing those expressions with the result of evaluating them. The goal of this pass is to frontload all of the computations that we can. To achieve this, the constant folding pass makes use of a visitor (ConstantChecker) and a mutator (ConstantFolder).

The ConstantChecker Visitor

This visitor is used to check if an expression is constant. In Relay, we define an expression to be constant if it is a ConstantNode or it is a TupleNode with only constant fields.

We use a memo_ field to map from nodes to whether they are constant and to cache these results. Below are the VisitExpr_ definitions in the ConstantChecker.

void VisitExpr_(const ConstantNode* n) final {
  memo_[GetRef<Constant>(n)] = true;
}

void VisitExpr_(const TupleNode* n) final {
  bool result = true;
  for (const auto& field : n->fields) {
    if (!Check(field)) {
      result = false;
      break;
    }
  }
  memo_[GetRef<Tuple>(n)] = result;
}

The bookkeeping used to coordinate these definitions is a Check method that returns whether the given expression is considered constant.

bool Check(const Expr& expr) {
  const auto it = memo_.find(expr);
  if (it != memo_.end())
    return it->second;
  VisitExpr(expr);
  return memo_[expr];
}

We don’t modify memo_ for every node we encounter; instead we only modify memo_ when the encountered node could potentially be constant. Then we rely on the default value being false when memo_ doesn’t contain expr.

The ConstantFolder Mutator

This mutator performs the bulk of the constant folding pass and internally uses ConstantChecker. In Relay, there are three node types that are involved in constant folding: LetNode, TupleItemGetNode, and CallNode. In the following paragraphs, we explain the roles of each in the pass.

Expr VisitExpr_(const LetNode* op) final {
  Expr value = this->Mutate(op->value);
  if (value.as<ConstantNode>()) {
    memo_[op->var] = value;
    return this->Mutate(op->body);
  } else {
    Var var = Downcast<Var>(this->Mutate(op->var));
    Expr body = this->Mutate(op->body);
    if (var.same_as(op->var) &&
        value.same_as(op->value) &&
        body.same_as(op->body)) {
      return GetRef<Expr>(op);
    } else {
      return Let(var, value, body);
    }
  }
}

In the LetNode case, we first attempt to const-fold the value being bound in the expression. If we can, then we populate memo_ and return the result of visiting the body—essentially, propagating the bound value to its use sites in the body. If we can’t const-fold the bound value, we mimic the default implementation.

Expr VisitExpr_(const TupleGetItemNode* op) final {
  Expr res = ExprMutator::VisitExpr_(op);
  op = res.as<TupleGetItemNode>();
  if (const auto* tuple = op->tuple.as<TupleNode>()) {
    return tuple->fields[op->index];
  } else {
    return res;
  }
}

In the TupleItemGetNode case, we check if op->tuple field is a TupleNode. If so, we replace the tuple get with the field of the tuple pointed to by op->index. The reason we need to check is because op->tuple might evaluate to a tuple, without itself being a tuple.

Expr VisitExpr_(const CallNode* call) final {
  static auto op_stateful = Op::GetAttrMap<TOpIsStateful>("TOpIsStateful");
  Expr res = ExprMutator::VisitExpr_(call);
  call = res.as<CallNode>();
  // We don't constant fold function with zero arguments.
  // This is a heuristic that is useful.
  // For example it is harmful to fold ones(shape=(4, 5)).
  if (call->args.size() == 0) return res;
  const OpNode* op = call->op.as<OpNode>();
  if (op == nullptr) return res;
  // skip stateful ops.
  if (op_stateful.get(GetRef<Op>(op), false)) return res;
  bool all_const_args = true;
  for (Expr arg : call->args) {
    if (!checker_.Check(arg)) {
      all_const_args = false;
    }
  }
  if (all_const_args) {
    return ConstEvaluate(res);
  } else {
    return res;
  }
}

In the CallNode case, we first use the VisitExpr_ of ExprMutator to visit the call, which const-folds all of the fields of the call. We use ExprMutator::VisitExpr_ instead of VisitExpr, because we want to bypass the vtable (to avoid an infinite loop) and use the default implementation provided by ExprMutator. Then we evaluate the call only if all of the arguments are constant (using ConstantChecker). Evaluating the call produces a value, so we use a helper method ValueToExpr to allow us to place the evaluated expression back into the AST.

Now, we construct a more convenient interface FoldConstant for our constant folder. FoldConstant is a standalone function outside of the ConstantFolder class that takes an expression and internally creates and uses a ConstantFolder instance (the full definition can be found in src/relay/transforms/fold_constant.cc).

Registering a Pass with the Pass Manager

Note: please see the documentation on the :ref:`pass-infra` for more specific detail on this subject.

With the AST traversers written, the pass can be registered to become a TVM API endpoint with the following code:

namespace transform {

Pass FoldConstant() {
  runtime::TypedPackedFunc<Function(Function, Module, PassContext)> pass_func =
    [=](Function f, Module m, PassContext pc) {
      return Downcast<Function>(FoldConstant(f));
  };
  return CreateFunctionPass(pass_func, 2, "FoldConstant", {});
}

}  // namespace transform

If the Pass object produced by the above code is given to the pass infrastructure, it will ensure that the AST traversal is applied to every function in the given Relay module, which is the behavior one would expect for a constant folding pass (it should fold all constants where possible).

The function CreateFunctionPass allows for registering the optimization level of the pass (in this case, 2), which can be used to group together passes based on their general utility, a name for the pass, and any dependencies for the pass. A pass’s dependencies are given as a list of any passes whose results are necessary to be able to run the current pass. FoldConstant does not have any dependencies, but many Relay passes do depend on having type information, so InferType is a common dependency; others may depend on the program’s being in A-normal form, via the ToANormalForm pass.

Note that the PassContext object contains information a pass uses for error reporting and configuration options; FoldConstant does not need this information but other passes may reference their PassContext objects.

The pass can now be invoked via the pass infrastructure, though it’s a good idea to also add a Python binding for the pass, as in this code snippet:

TVM_REGISTER_GLOBAL("relay._transform.FoldConstant")
.set_body_typed(FoldConstant);

Once Pass objects are defined in the above fashion, they can be invoked using the pass infrastructure’s Sequential construct, which takes a list of passes and applies them in sequence to a Relay module, obtaining a transformed module as a result. For example, the below code applies both the FoldConstant and ToANormalForm passes (one after the other) to each function in mod and obtains a new module.

seq = transform.Sequential([
    relay.transform.FoldConstant(),
    relay.transform.ToANormalForm()
])
new_mod = seq(mod)

More detail about registration can be found in TVM Runtime System and more information about the pass manager interface can be found in Pass Infrastructure. Relay’s standard passes are listed in include/tvm/relay/transform.h and implemented in src/relay/transforms/.