Measuring the Redundancy of Decoder Layers in SpeechLLMs
#SpeechLLMs #decoder layers #redundancy #model pruning #computational efficiency #speech processing #AI research
📌 Key Takeaways
- Researchers developed a method to measure redundancy in decoder layers of SpeechLLMs.
- The study identifies which layers contribute minimally to model performance.
- Findings suggest potential for optimizing SpeechLLMs by pruning redundant layers.
- This could lead to more efficient speech processing models with reduced computational costs.
📖 Full Retelling
arXiv:2603.05121v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speech Large Language Models route speech encoder representations into an LLM decoder that typically accounts for over 90% of total parameters. We study how much of this decoder capacity is actually needed for speech tasks. Across two LLM families and three scales (1-8B), we show that decoder redundancy is largely inherited from the pretrained LLM: text and speech inputs yield similar redundant blocks. We then measure excess capacity by pruning
🏷️ Themes
AI Optimization, Speech Processing
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Original Source
--> Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2603.05121 [Submitted on 5 Mar 2026] Title: Measuring the Redundancy of Decoder Layers in SpeechLLMs Authors: Adel Moumen , Guangzhi Sun , Philip C Woodland View a PDF of the paper titled Measuring the Redundancy of Decoder Layers in SpeechLLMs, by Adel Moumen and 2 other authors View PDF HTML Abstract: Speech Large Language Models route speech encoder representations into an LLM decoder that typically accounts for over 90% of total parameters. We study how much of this decoder capacity is actually needed for speech tasks. Across two LLM families and three scales (1-8B), we show that decoder redundancy is largely inherited from the pretrained LLM: text and speech inputs yield similar redundant blocks. We then measure excess capacity by pruning decoder layers and analysing post-pruning healing to increase robustness. Our findings show that 7-8B models retain good ASR performance with only 60% of decoder layers, and the same trend extends to smaller scales with reduced pruning tolerance. We then generalise to speech translation, and show that the same blocks of layers are redundant across speech encoders, tasks and languages, indicating that a more global redundancy structure exists, enabling a single pruned and multi-tasks SpeechLLM backbone to be deployed. Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL) ; Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.05121 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:2603.05121v1 [cs.CL] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.05121 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Adel Moumen [ view email ] [v1] Thu, 5 Mar 2026 12:50:24 UTC (136 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Measuring the Redundancy of Decoder Layers in SpeechLLMs, by Adel Moumen and 2 other authors View PDF HTML TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CL < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI Referen...
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