Sample record. This work is fictional demonstration content. Results, people and institutions are placeholders; references in full-text articles are real publications.
Abstract
Several studies report that language models use information in the middle of a long context less reliably than information at the start or end. We replicate these findings across eleven models and four context lengths using a controlled retrieval task. The effect is reproducible but smaller than originally reported, and largely disappears when the task format is held fixed across lengths. We release the harness and the full per-position results.
Keywords long context · position bias · replication · retrieval
Full text
CTM-PP-2026-0003-v1.pdf
Declarations
- Author contributions
- Author contributions are listed in the PDF.
- Funding
- Sample record – no funding to declare.
- Competing interests
- The authors declare no competing interests.
- Data and code availability
- Sample article. All results, names and affiliations in this demonstration article are synthetic placeholders.
Versions
Version 1 · 19 August 2026Latest
First version.
10.xxxx/ctm.pp.2026.0003.v1
How to cite
Wagner, E. & Ibarra, T. (2026). Position Bias in Long-Context Retrieval: A Replication Study [Preprint, version 1]. CONTINUUM Preprints. doi:10.xxxx/ctm.pp.2026.0003
© 2026 The authors. Published by AEX CONTINUUM under the CC BY 4.0 licence.