GHOST: Unmasking Phantom States in Mamba2 via Grouped Hidden-state Output-aware Selection & Truncation

While Mamba2's expanded state dimension enhances temporal modeling, it incurs substantial inference overhead that saturates bandwidth during autoregressive generation. Standard pruning methods fail to address this bottleneck: unstructured sparsity leaves activations dense, magnitude-based selection ignores runtime dynamics, and gradient-based methods impose prohibitive costs. We introduce GHOST (Grouped Hidden-state Output-aware Selection and Truncation), a structured pruning framework that approximates control-theoretic balanced truncation using only forward-pass statistics. By jointly measuring controllability and observability, GHOST rivals the fidelity of gradient-based methods without requiring backpropagation. As a highlight, on models ranging from 130M to 2.7B parameters, our approach achieves a 50% state-dimension reduction with approximately 1 perplexity point increase on WikiText-2. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mamba2_ghost-7BCB/.