AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is recency bias in prompts?
Recency bias in prompts: A tendency of models to lean toward the last example or the last instruction in a prompt, giving it extra weight. The order of few-shot examples can therefore change the output. Testing several orderings or placing the key rule last helps manage it.
Recency bias in prompts: an example
With the final example labelled 'spam', a model labels an uncertain email as spam; swapping the example order flips the answer.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Refine summarisation
- Reflexion
- Repetition penalty
- Rephrase and Respond
- Role prompting
- Rolling summary
- Schema-constrained generation
- Scratchpad
Where you learn it
Recency bias in prompts is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.