AI RESEARCH
The Position Curse: LLMs Struggle to Locate the Last Few Items in a List
arXiv CS.LG
•
ArXi:2605.07127v1 Announce Type: new Modern large language models (LLMs) can find a needle in a haystack (locating a single relevant fact buried among hundreds of thousands of irrelevant tokens) with near-saturated accuracy, yet fail to retrieve the last few items in a short list. We call this failure the Position Curse. For instance, even in a two-line code snippet, Claude Opus 4.6 misidentifies the second-to-last line most of the time.