prompting · reorder-context-by-relevance

Put important material first or last

Order retrieved documents so the most relevant sit at the start and end of the prompt.

Because recall is best at the edges of the context, rank retrieved passages by relevance and place the top ones first and last, weakest in the middle. Also truncate aggressively: fewer, better passages beat many.

Addresses: Losing information in long inputs

Contexts: Retrieval-augmented QA, Long document

Does it work?

contested1 supporting · 2 contesting sources · last moved 2026-09-07

Efficacy claims — what this technique actually moves, under which conditions, and whether that has been contested.

mechanismsingle papercontested
Where a passage sits in a long input changes how much the model uses it — accuracy is highest when the needed information is at the very start or the very end and lowest when it is in the middle — so ordering retrieved passages to put the most relevant ones first is a real lever on accuracy.

Code

https://github.com/nelson-liu/lost-in-the-middle — Evaluation code and data to measure position sensitivity for your own model.verified 2026-09-02

Sources

Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts (2023)