Spectral-Aligned Pruning for Universal Error-Correcting Code Transformers

Abstract: Recently, the Foundation Error Correction Code Transformer (FECCT) has emerged as a promising universal channel decoder, achieving competitive decoding performance across diverse code families by relying on a single shared model backbone, optionally followed by code-specific retraining. Despite this flexibility, the high computational complexity and large parameter footprint of transformer-based decoders present substantial obstacles to practical deployment. To address these challenges, we investigate structured pruning for FECCT and propose Spectral-Aligned Pruning (SAP), a structure-aware framework that enables cross-code reuse of structured pruning masks across codes by leveraging the spectrum of the corresponding bipartite graph. After pruning, SAP performs per-code recovery via parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA), enabling a shared pruned backbone while storing only small code-specific adapter parameters. Experiments across diverse codes show that SAP achieves decoding performance comparable to dedicated per-code pruning, while enabling substantial reductions in computational cost and model memory footprint through kernel-level structured pruning.