Task-Aware Spectral Pruning: A Mixture-of-Masks Framework for Efficient LLM Inference

arXiv:2609.29499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Static pruning imposes one sparse structure on every prompt, even though reasoning, retrieval, generation, coding, and translation can depend on different parts of a language model. We introduce Task-Aware Spectral Pruning (TASP), a post-training framework that calibrates module-level spectral descriptors against measured task-specific ablation effects, closes grouped-query-attention and SwiGLU dependencies during sparse-mask construction, and routes each user turn to one compiled mask that remains fixed throughout prefill and decoding. A module-disjoint pilot first determines whether the spectral signal is informative before full calibration. Under the stated retrospective operating rule, the pilot passes on the evaluated Llama-3-8B and Llama-3-70B checkpoints but rejects Qwen2.5-1.5B, demonstrating that applicability is model-dependent rather than universal. At a 43% active-FLOP reduction, the Llama-3-70B benchmark harness retains 97.7 +/- 0.2% of the dense BF16 score. In the deployment-matched INT8-weight/BF16-compute runtime on a single A100 80GB, the compiled sparse path retains 97.3 +/- 0.2% relative to dense BF16 and reduces decode latency from 45.2 +/- 0.4 to 31.3 +/- 0.4 ms/token, yielding a 1.44x speedup. Factorized ablations, disjoint-module tests, compiled structured baselines, routing-corruption studies, and an explicit 136-GPU-hour calibration audit further delimit the source and operating regime of these gains