Public large language models (LLMs) are typically safety-aligned during pretraining, but task-specific fine-tuning often erodes this alignment, introducing significant safety risks. Existing defenses are largely coupled with the fine-tuning process, incurring high computational overhead and complex workflows. To address these challenges, we propose Q-realign, a post-hoc defense based on quantization. Departing from the conventional view of quantization as a safety-eroding compromise, we reframe it as a dual-purpose mechanism for both compression and safety recovery. This allows Q-realign to decouple safety alignment from fine-tuning and naturally piggyback onto modern deployment pipelines. Experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate that our method substantially reduces unsafe behaviors while preserving task performance, significantly improving memory and GPU efficiency. Notably, our approach can recover the safety alignment of a fine-tuned 7B LLM on a single RTX 4090 within 40 minutes. Overall, our work provides a practical, turnkey solution for safety-aware deployment. Our code is released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Q-realign-copy-0D71.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly organized into multi-agent systems for complex reasoning and decision-making tasks. However, scaling such systems can substantially increase inference cost, especially when multiple agents repeatedly process overlapping or role-irrelevant context. Many existing multi-agent frameworks focus on orchestration and role specialization, but still rely on full-context sharing or static context routing, leading to redundant token consumption, increased runtime, and inefficient memory utilization. We present Role-Conditioned Context Routing (RCR), an execution-time layer that allocates role-relevant shared-memory items to agents under token budgets. Given a structured shared memory and a set of role-specialized agents, RCR selectively routes task-relevant memory items to each agent according to its role, optional task-stage metadata, and token budget. RCR integrates role-conditioned relevance scoring, token-budgeted memory selection, and iterative memory updates to reduce redundant context exposure during multi-agent execution. Experiments on multi-hop QA, embodied reasoning (ALFWorld), and web-based decision-making (WebShop) show that RCR reduces token usage by 35% on average and runtime by 38% on average relative to Full-Context, while maintaining or improving task performance.

Streaming video understanding requires answering questions at arbitrary times over a continuously growing visual stream. The central challenge is to compactly remember long-range history while effectively retrieving question-relevant evidence. We propose Dynamic Hub-and-Spoke Memory (D-HSM), a training-free framework that represents distant history as structured textual memory while preserving the recent frames as visual tokens for fine-grained perception. Specifically, D-HSM turns selected historical video chunks into typed textual observations and stores them in an entity-centered hub-and-spoke memory, with entities as hubs and related evidence as spokes. When answering a question, D-HSM dynamically retrieves a compact question-aware memory subset, expands it through hub-and-spoke links, and combines it with the recent visual window for frozen-VLM answer prediction. Extensive experiments on both streaming and long video benchmarks show that D-HSM consistently and substantially improves VLM backbones and outperforms other state-of-the-art online and offline video understanding baselines.

Despite the superior performance, it is challenging to deploy large language models (LLMs) due to their massive parameters and computations. While pruning is a promising technique to reduce model size and accelerate the inference, the traditional pruning techniques can hardly be applied for LLMs as they need to finetune the model on the full dataset with multiple epochs consuming massive data and hardware resources. To deal with this problem, post-training pruning methods are proposed to prune LLMs in one-shot without retraining. However, their accuracy after pruning may suffer from certain performance degradation due to the lack of retraining with massive data. To address this issue, in this paper, we first formulate the post-training problem for layer-wise LLM compression to simultaneously prune multiple weights in LLMs. Next, we provide an optimal solution for this problem and design our post-training pruning algorithm for both unstructured and semi-structured sparsity. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods in comparison to SOTA baselines across various LLM families including transformer-based LLMs and Mamba-based LLMs.

Recent advancements in State Space Models (SSMs) have attracted significant interest, particularly in models optimized for parallel training and handling long-range dependencies. Architectures like Mamba have scaled to billions of parameters with selective SSM. To facilitate broader applications using Mamba, exploring its efficiency is crucial. While token reduction techniques offer a straightforward post-training strategy, we find that applying existing methods directly to SSMs leads to substantial performance drops. Through insightful analysis, we identify the reasons for this failure and the limitations of current techniques. In response, we propose a tailored, unified post-training token reduction method for SSMs. Our approach integrates token importance and similarity, thus taking advantage of both pruning and merging, to devise a fine-grained intra-layer token reduction strategy. Extensive experiments show that our method improves the average accuracy by 5.7% to 13.1% on six benchmarks with Mamba-2 compared to existing methods, while significantly reducing computational demands and memory requirements.