The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is largely hindered by their large number of parameters. Structural pruning has emerged as a promising solution. Prior structured pruning methods directly remove unimportant parameters based on certain metrics, which often causes knowledge loss and necessitates extensive retraining. To overcome this, we introduce a novel pruning method **TRSP**: **T**wo-Stage **R**egularization-Based **S**tructured **P**runing for LLMs. Specifically, we multiply the output of each transformer layer by an initial learnable weight and iteratively learn these weights by adding their ℓ₁-norm as a regularization term to the loss function, serving as the first-stage regularization. Subsequently, we apply additional regularization to the difference between the output and input of layers with smaller weights, encouraging the shift of knowledge to the preserved layers. This serves as the second-stage regularization. TRSP retains more knowledge and better preserves model performance than direct parameter elimination. Through extensive experimentation we show that TRSP outperforms strong layer-wise structured pruning methods without requiring retraining. As a layer-wise pruning method, it delivers notable end-to-end acceleration, making it a promising solution for efficient LLM deployment.

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of routing techniques, which aim to efficiently select the optimal LLM from diverse candidates to tackle specific tasks, optimizing performance while reducing costs. Current LLM routing methods are limited in effectiveness due to insufficient exploration of the intrinsic connection between user queries and the characteristics of LLMs. To address this issue, in this paper, we present **RadialRouter**, a novel framework for LLM routing which employs a lightweight Transformer-based backbone with a radial structure named **RadialFormer** to articulate the query-LLMs relationship. The optimal LLM selection is performed based on the final states of RadialFormer. The pipeline is further refined by an objective function that combines Kullback-Leibler divergence with the query-query contrastive loss to enhance robustness. Experimental results on RouterBench show that RadialRouter significantly outperforms existing routing methods by 9.2% and 5.8% in the *Balance* and *Cost First* scenarios, respectively. Additionally, its adaptability toward different performance-cost trade-offs and the dynamic LLM pool demonstrates practical application potential.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a crucial method for addressing hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). While recent research has extended RAG models to complex noisy scenarios, these explorations often confine themselves to limited noise types and presuppose that noise is inherently detrimental to LLMs, potentially deviating from real-world retrieval environments and restricting practical applicability. In this paper, we define seven distinct noise types from a linguistic perspective and establish a Noise RAG Benchmark (NoiserBench), a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing multiple datasets and reasoning tasks. Through empirical evaluation of eight representative LLMs with diverse architectures and scales, we reveal that these noises can be further categorized into two practical groups: noise that is beneficial to LLMs (aka beneficial noise) and noise that is harmful to LLMs (aka harmful noise). While harmful noise generally impairs performance, beneficial noise may enhance several aspects of model capabilities and overall performance. Our analysis offers insights for developing robust RAG solutions and mitigating hallucinations across diverse retrieval scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/jinyangwu/NoiserBench.