The Sirens' Song: When Proximal Background Context Overshadows Distant Evidence
Long-context LLMs focus on retrieving distant evidence from extensive context, yet existing work has largely focused on overcoming distance alone. In this work, we identify the Proximity Trap, insufficient attention to distant evidence often arises less from distance itself than from cumulative competition with abundant, task-irrelevant proximal background. To address the Proximity Trap, we introduce LYRA (Long-context heavY-tailed Relevance Alignment), a t-distributed directional matching mechanism that reshapes the context retrieval distribution, directing more attention mass toward task-relevant evidence, while preserving the relative positional information encoded. Extensive experimen...
| Authors | Xiaoyu Yang, Jie Lu, Wei Duan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 22 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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