Wei Yang

Xiaoning Feng, Xiaohong Han, Simin Chen et al.

In this paper, we make the first attempt to understand and test potential computation efficiency robustness in state-of-the-art LLMs. By analyzing the working mechanism and implementation of 20,543 public-accessible LLMs, we observe a fundamental property in LLMs that could be manipulated in an adversarial manner to reduce computation efficiency significantly. Our key motivation is to generate test inputs that could sufficiently delay the generation of EOS such that LLMs would have to go through enough iterations to satisfy the pre-configured threshold. We present \tool, which can work under both white-box setting and black-box setting. In the white-box scenario, \tool develops a gradient-guided technique that searches for a minimal and unnoticeable perturbation at character-level, token-level, and structure-level. In the black-box scenario, \tool employs a causal inference-based approach to find critical tokens and similarly applies three levels of imperceptible perturbation to them. Both the white-box and black-box settings effectively delay the appearance of EOS, compelling these inputs to reach the naturally-unreachable threshold. To demonstrate the effectiveness of \tool, we conduct a systematic evaluation on nine public-available LLMs: Google T5, AllenAI WMT14, Helsinki-NLP translator, Facebook FairSeq, UNICAMP-DL translator, MarianMT, Google FLAN-T5, MBZUAI LaMini-GPT and Salesforce CodeGen. Experimental results show that \tool can increase on average LLMs' response latency and energy consumption by 325\% to 3244\% and 344\% to 3616\%, respectively, by perturbing just one character or token in the input sentence.

Dongjiang Li, Xuesong Shi, Qiwei Long et al.

A robust and efficient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system is essential for robot autonomy. For visual SLAM algorithms, though the theoretical framework has been well established for most aspects, feature extraction and association is still empirically designed in most cases, and can be vulnerable in complex environments. This paper shows that feature extraction with deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be seamlessly incorporated into a modern SLAM framework. The proposed SLAM system utilizes a state-of-the-art CNN to detect keypoints in each image frame, and to give not only keypoint descriptors, but also a global descriptor of the whole image. These local and global features are then used by different SLAM modules, resulting in much more robustness against environmental changes and viewpoint changes compared with using hand-crafted features. We also train a visual vocabulary of local features with a Bag of Words (BoW) method. Based on the local features, global features, and the vocabulary, a highly reliable loop closure detection method is built. Experimental results show that all the proposed modules significantly outperforms the baseline, and the full system achieves much lower trajectory errors and much higher correct rates on all evaluated data. Furthermore, by optimizing the CNN with Intel OpenVINO toolkit and utilizing the Fast BoW library, the system benefits greatly from the SIMD (single-instruction-multiple-data) techniques in modern CPUs. The full system can run in real-time without any GPU or other accelerators. The code is public at https://github.com/ivipsourcecode/dxslam.

Wenbing Li, Zikai Song, Hang Zhou et al.

Recent efforts to combine low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with mixture-of-experts (MoE) for adapting large language models (LLMs) to multiple tasks still exhibit prevailing limitations: they either swap entire attention/feed-forward layers for switch experts or bolt on parallel expert branches, diluting parameter efficiency and task fidelity. We propose the LoRA-Mixer, a modular and lightweight MoE framework that integrates LoRA experts. Our core innovation lies in replacing the projection matrices of the attention module's input/output linear layers with dynamically routed, task-specific LoRA experts. This design ensures seamless compatibility with diverse foundation models, including transformers and state space models (SSMs), by leveraging their inherent linear projection structures. The framework supports two operational paradigms: (1) joint optimization of LoRA experts and routing mechanisms via a novel hard-soft routing strategy, or (2) direct deployment of pre-trained, frozen LoRA modules sourced from external repositories. To enable robust router training with limited data while ensuring stable routing decisions and maximizing expert reuse, we introduce an adaptive Specialization Balance Loss (SBL) that jointly optimizes expert balance and task-specific alignment. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets, including MedQA, CoLA, SST-2, GSM8K, ARC-E, ARC-C, and HumanEval, demonstrate the effectiveness of LoRA-Mixer. On datasets such as GSM8K, HumanEval, and MedQA, LoRA-Mixer achieves significant improvements of 7.61%, 4.88%, and 3.08% over the base models, respectively. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, LoRA-Mixer achieves additional improvements of 1.09%, 1.45%, and 1.68%, respectively, using only 48% of the parameters, demonstrating its efficiency and strong performance.

Xuesong Shi, Dongjiang Li, Pengpeng Zhao et al.

Service robots should be able to operate autonomously in dynamic and daily changing environments over an extended period of time. While Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is one of the most fundamental problems for robotic autonomy, most existing SLAM works are evaluated with data sequences that are recorded in a short period of time. In real-world deployment, there can be out-of-sight scene changes caused by both natural factors and human activities. For example, in home scenarios, most objects may be movable, replaceable or deformable, and the visual features of the same place may be significantly different in some successive days. Such out-of-sight dynamics pose great challenges to the robustness of pose estimation, and hence a robot's long-term deployment and operation. To differentiate the forementioned problem from the conventional works which are usually evaluated in a static setting in a single run, the term \textit{lifelong SLAM} is used here to address SLAM problems in an ever-changing environment over a long period of time. To accelerate lifelong SLAM research, we release the OpenLORIS-Scene datasets. The data are collected in real-world indoor scenes, for multiple times in each place to include scene changes in real life. We also design benchmarking metrics for lifelong SLAM, with which the robustness and accuracy of pose estimation are evaluated separately. The datasets and benchmark are available online at https://lifelong-robotic-vision.github.io/dataset/scene.