EOP-LLM: Energy Oriented Pruning for Large Language Models

Guan Huang, Tao Shu


Abstract
In deployed large language models (LLMs), inference energy consumption has grown rapidly and has emerged as a key bottleneck in large-scale deployment, yet most existing inference efficiency methods focus on reducing FLOPs or latency, rather than explicitly modeling or enforcing end-to-end inference energy constraints. We propose EOP-LLM, an energy-oriented dynamic pruning framework that enables LLM inference under explicit per-sequence energy budgets. EOP-LLM combines a device-calibrated energy proxy with lightweight token and feed-forward (FFN) selectors, coordinated through a global dual variable, to dynamically allocate computation while preserving model quality. Extensive experiments on LLaMA 3.2 (1B/3B) and LLaMA 3.1 (8B) demonstrate that EOP-LLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic pruning baselines under matched energy budgets, while strictly adhering to per-sequence energy constraints.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.367
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7443–7464
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.367/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guan Huang and Tao Shu. 2026. EOP-LLM: Energy Oriented Pruning for Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 7443–7464, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EOP-LLM: Energy Oriented Pruning for Large Language Models (Huang & Shu, Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.367.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.findings-acl.367.checklist.pdf