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Our experiments reveal that embedding models, irrespective of their positional encoding mechanisms, disproportionately prioritize the beginning of an input. Ablation studies demonstrate that insertion of irrelevant text or removal at the start of a document reduces cosine similarity between altered and original embeddings by up to 12.3% more than ablations at the end. Regression analysis further confirms this bias, with sentence importance declining as position moves further from the start, even with with content-agnosticity. We hypothesize that this effect arises from pre-processing strategies and chosen positional encoding techniques. These findings quantify the sensitivity of retrieval systems and suggest a new lens towards embedding model robustness.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15241v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15241v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"quantifying-positional-biases-in-text","repo_url":"https://github.com/sgoel97/neurips-embedding-positional-bias","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Position"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"semantic-similarity","task_name":"Semantic Similarity"},{"task_slug":"semantic-textual-similarity","task_name":"Semantic Textual Similarity"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2412.15241","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2412.15241"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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