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Retrieval & EmbeddingsMedium· Retrieval· Evaluation· Positional Bias

We cut k from 20 to 5 and accuracy went up. Explain wha...

Reducing k from 20 to 5 had two potential effects: removing noisy distractors or changing the position of the relevant information relative to the prompt. To diagnose the cause, you should keep k=20 but reorder the retrieved chunks so the gold chunk is placed near the prompt. If accuracy improves with reordering, the issue was positional bias; if it does not, the lower-ranked chunks were simply noise.

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