Do RAG Systems Suffer From Positional Bias?
Authors: name: Florin Cuconasu; name: Simone Filice; name: Guy Horowitz; name: Yoelle Maarek; name: Fabrizio Silvestri
Published: 2025-05-21 14:18:01

Abstract: Retrieval Augmented Generation enhances LLM accuracy by adding passages
retrieved from an external corpus to the LLM prompt. This paper investigates
how positional bias - the tendency of LLMs to weight information differently
based on its position in the prompt - affects not only the LLM's capability to
capitalize on relevant passages, but also its susceptibility to distracting
passages. Through extensive experiments on three benchmarks, we show how
state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines, while attempting to retrieve relevant
passages, systematically bring highly distracting ones to the top ranks, with
over 60% of queries containing at least one highly distracting passage among
the top-10 retrieved passages. As a result, the impact of the LLM positional
bias, which in controlled settings is often reported as very prominent by
related works, is actually marginal in real scenarios since both relevant and
distracting passages are, in turn, penalized. Indeed, our findings reveal that
sophisticated strategies that attempt to rearrange the passages based on LLM
positional preferences do not perform better than random shuffling.