Yu Liu
Other people with similar names: Yu Liu, Yu Liu, Yu Liu
Unverified author pages with similar names: Yu Liu
2026
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs
Jie Sun | Yu Liu | Lu Han | Qiwen Deng | Xiang Shu | Yang Xiao | Lintao Ma | Xingyu Lu | Jun Zhou | Pengfei Liu | Jiancan Wu | Xiang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jie Sun | Yu Liu | Lu Han | Qiwen Deng | Xiang Shu | Yang Xiao | Lintao Ma | Xingyu Lu | Jun Zhou | Pengfei Liu | Jiancan Wu | Xiang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
While transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically support massive context windows, they suffer from severe performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. We attribute this failure to the attention dispersion in the Softmax mechanism, which prevents the model from concentrating attention. To overcome this, we propose Separate Sequence (SepSeq), a training-free, plug-and-play framework to mitigate dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens. Mechanistically, we demonstrate that separator tokens act as an attention anchor, recalibrating attention to focus on local segments while preserving global context. Extensive evaluations on 9 widely-adopted LLMs confirm the effectiveness of our approach: SepSeq yields an average relative accuracy improvement of 35.6% across diverse domains while reducing 16.4% inference token consumption.