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While large language models (LLMs) are equipped with longer text input capabilities than before, they are struggling to seek correct information in long contexts. The "lost in the middle" problem challenges most LLMs, referring to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Junqing He , Kunhao Pan , Xiaoqun Dong , Zhuoyang Song , Yibo Liu , Qianguo Sun , Yuxin Liang , Hao Wang , Enming Zhang , Jiaxing Zhang

Positional bias in large language models (LLMs) hinders their ability to effectively process long inputs. A prominent example is the "lost in the middle" phenomenon, where LLMs struggle to utilize relevant information situated in the middle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Runchu Tian , Yanghao Li , Yuepeng Fu , Siyang Deng , Qinyu Luo , Cheng Qian , Shuo Wang , Xin Cong , Zhong Zhang , Yesai Wu , Yankai Lin , Huadong Wang , Xiaojiang Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to use information across long inputs effectively. Prior work has identified positional biases, such as the Lost in the Middle (LiM) effect, where models perform better when information appears at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Blerta Veseli , Julian Chibane , Mariya Toneva , Alexander Koller

LLMs have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding tasks but continue to struggle with long-context comprehension, particularly with content located in the middle of extensive inputs. This limitation, known as the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 James Begin , Namit Agrawal , Eshan Singh , Yicheng Fu , Sean O'Brien , Vasu Sharma , Kevin Zhu

While recent language models have the ability to take long contexts as input, relatively little is known about how well they use longer context. We analyze the performance of language models on two tasks that require identifying relevant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Nelson F. Liu , Kevin Lin , John Hewitt , Ashwin Paranjape , Michele Bevilacqua , Fabio Petroni , Percy Liang

The context window of large language models has been extended to 128k tokens or more. However, language models still suffer from position bias and have difficulty in accessing and using the middle part of the context due to the lack of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Meiru Zhang , Zaiqiao Meng , Nigel Collier

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in various real-world scenarios due to their excellent generalization capabilities and robust generative abilities. However, they exhibit position bias, also known as "lost in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Yijiong Yu , Huiqiang Jiang , Xufang Luo , Qianhui Wu , Chin-Yew Lin , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang , Yongfeng Huang , Lili Qiu

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) often degrades when crucial information is in the middle of a long context, a "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon that mirrors the primacy and recency effects in human memory. We propose that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Nikolaus Salvatore , Hao Wang , Qiong Zhang

Previous work finds that recent long-context language models fail to make equal use of information in the middle of their inputs, preferring pieces of information located at the tail ends which creates an undue bias in situations where we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-16 George Arthur Baker , Ankush Raut , Sagi Shaier , Lawrence E Hunter , Katharina von der Wense

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, they often struggle with long-text sequences due to the ``lost in the middle'' phenomenon. This issue has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zewen Qiang , Sendong Zhao , Haochun Wang , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

The development of Long-Context Large Language Models (LLMs) has markedly advanced natural language processing by facilitating the process of textual data across long documents and multiple corpora. However, Long-Context LLMs still face two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Jingyang Deng , Zhengyang Shen , Boyang Wang , Lixin Su , Suqi Cheng , Ying Nie , Junfeng Wang , Dawei Yin , Jinwen Ma

The diminishing ability of large language models (LLMs) to effectively utilize long-range context-the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon-poses a significant challenge in retrieval-based LLM applications. To study the impact of this phenomenon…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Mihir Gupte , Eshan Dixit , Muhammad Tayyab , Arun Adiththan

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to recall and retrieve information from long contexts is critical for many real-world applications. Prior work (Liu et al., 2023) reported that LLMs suffer significant drops in retrieval accuracy…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Max McKinnon

Long-context large language models (LLMs) are prone to be distracted by irrelevant contexts. The reason for distraction remains poorly understood. In this paper, we first identify the contextual heads, a special group of attention heads…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Youxiang Zhu , Ruochen Li , Danqing Wang , Daniel Haehn , Xiaohui Liang

While many contemporary large language models (LLMs) can process lengthy input, they still struggle to fully utilize information within the long context, known as the lost-in-the-middle challenge. We hypothesize that it stems from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Shengnan An , Zexiong Ma , Zeqi Lin , Nanning Zheng , Jian-Guang Lou

This paper aims to overcome the "lost-in-the-middle" challenge of large language models (LLMs). While recent advancements have successfully enabled LLMs to perform stable language modeling with up to 4 million tokens, the persistent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Zhenyu Zhang , Runjin Chen , Shiwei Liu , Zhewei Yao , Olatunji Ruwase , Beidi Chen , Xiaoxia Wu , Zhangyang Wang

Large language models (LLMs) excel in abstractive summarization tasks, delivering fluent and pertinent summaries. Recent advancements have extended their capabilities to handle long-input contexts, exceeding 100k tokens. However, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Mathieu Ravaut , Aixin Sun , Nancy F. Chen , Shafiq Joty

Despite significant advancements, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit blind spots that impair their ability to retrieve and process relevant contextual data effectively. We demonstrate that LLM performance in graph tasks with complexities…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Hamed Firooz , Maziar Sanjabi , Wenlong Jiang , Xiaoling Zhai

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit positional bias, struggling to utilize information from the middle or end of long contexts. Our study explores LLMs' long-context reasoning by probing their hidden representations. We find that while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Taiming Lu , Muhan Gao , Kuai Yu , Adam Byerly , Daniel Khashabi

We explore the internal mechanisms of how bias emerges in large language models (LLMs) when provided with ambiguous comparative prompts: inputs that compare or enforce choosing between two or more entities without providing clear context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Rishabh Adiga , Besmira Nushi , Varun Chandrasekaran
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