Context Position Matters: The Middle Gets Lost
Research shows models don’t use long contexts uniformly. Information in the middle tends to get less attention than content at the beginning and end.
This has practical implications:
- Put the most important information at the beginning of your context
- Critical instructions or constraints should be early, not buried
- More context isn’t always better, selective, relevant context often outperforms comprehensive context
The pattern holds even as context windows grow to 100K+ tokens. Bigger windows don’t fix the middle-attention problem; they may amplify it.
Design implication: When building RAG systems or prompt templates, structure matters as much as content. Position critical information deliberately.