Large Language Models (LLMs) typically come with a fixed architecture, despite growing evidence that not all layers contribute equally to every downstream task. We introduce TALE (Task-Aware Layer Elimination), an inference-time method that improves task performance by selectively removing layers that are irrelevant or detrimental for a given task. TALE optimizes task-specific performance, yielding a task-optimized architecture without retraining. Across 9 tasks and 5 model families, under both zero-shot and few-shot settings, TALE consistently matches or surpasses baseline performance while simultaneously reducing computational costs. TALE also synergizes with fine-tuning, leading to further performance improvements. Computing TALE for a new task requires modest resources, making it a practical and deployable solution for task-specialized LLM inference.

While transformer models exhibit strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities, they often fail to generalize under simple distribution shifts. We analyze these failures and identify Softmax, the scoring function in the attention mechanism, as a contributing factor. We propose Scaled Signed Averaging (SSA), a novel attention scoring function that mitigates these failures. SSA significantly improves performance on our ICL tasks and outperforms transformer models with Softmax on several NLP benchmarks and linguistic probing tasks, in both decoder-only and encoder-only architectures.