Solving the 'Lost in the Middle' Problem: Advanced RAG Techniques for Long-Context LLMs
TLDR: Long-context LLMs often miss information placed mid-sequence (“lost in the middle”), driven by positional biases like RoPE decay.
Production fixes: two-stage retrieval (broad recall + cross-encoder reranking), hybrid search (semantic + BM25), and strategic ordering (top evidence at start and end). Strengthen chunking with contextual retrieval; keep only the most relevant