AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is position bias?
Position bias: A pattern where a model treats information differently depending on where it sits in the prompt, often paying more attention to the start and end than the middle. It affects long documents, lists of options and answers judged side by side. Reordering inputs is the usual test.
Position bias: an example
When two candidate answers are shown to a judge model, it picks the first one more often regardless of quality.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Presence penalty
- Program-aided language models
- Prompt
- Prompt caching
- Prompt chaining
- Prompt compression
- Prompt engineering
- Prompt optimisation
Where you learn it
Position bias is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.