Recency bias
Recency bias is a model’s tendency to give more weight to instructions near the end of a prompt than to those buried earlier.
It is the practical reason to restate the task as the last line of a long prompt. It also explains a common failure: an instruction given at the top of a 3,000-word prompt is quietly overridden by a casual remark at the bottom.
Related terms
- Prompt structure
- Prompt structure is the order and separation of a prompt’s parts — role, context, task, constraints, format, examples — which changes model behaviour independently of the words used.
- Lost in the middle
- Lost in the middle is the observed effect that models recall information placed at the start or end of a long context more reliably than information in the middle.
More on prompt structure
See the full glossary, read the guides, or put it into practice in the prompt builder.