Lost in the middle confirmed in practice: context ordering matters as much as inclusion
ClickOk5811 · reddit · 2026-09-12
A Reddit user hit a case where a detail buried in the middle of a long context window (between two irrelevant sections) was missed by the model, while the same detail near the start or end was reliably retrieved — matching the documented "lost in the middle" U-shape: retrieval is strong at window edges, weak in the middle, and bigger context windows don't flatten the curve.
Key practical takeaway: context ordering matters as much as context inclusion. A load-bearing fact's position in the prompt does real work. Simply restructuring so the critical piece sits at the window edges fixed the retrieval failure without changing content. The post asks whether this curve holds consistently across current long-context models.
More from Models
- HSVSphere slams Opus 5: 'it actually makes you lose time' — yacineMTB · 2026-09-12
- China's AI adoption isn't low: token usage hits 140T/day vs US 45-50T, browser stats mislead — pstAsiatech · 2026-09-12
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash shows massive kernel-engineering gains, hits 4th on KernelBench-CUDA — teortaxesTex · 2026-09-12
- AI cracks a Millennium Prize problem — proof of accelerating and alarming progress — pstAsiatech · 2026-09-12
- V4.1 Scores 11/70 on Terminal-Bench-Science, Strongest in Physical Sciences — teortaxesTex · 2026-09-12
- User pleads for boolean operators in Grok's chat search, which broadens instead of narrowing — chrisgrayson · 2026-09-12