Definition
The point in a RAG pipeline where increasing the volume of retrieved context (top-k) leads to diminishing returns or performance degradation, often due to the LLM's inability to distinguish signal from noise within its context window. It represents a trade-off between higher recall and the cognitive load/attention dilution of the generator.
Information density in LLM prompts, not color intensity or chemical concentration.
"A crowded cocktail party where adding more guests makes it impossible to hear the specific person you are trying to listen to."
- Lost in the Middle(Phenomenon)
- Recall@K(Metric)
- Context Window(Constraint)
- Reranking(Mitigation Strategy)
Conceptual Overview
The point in a RAG pipeline where increasing the volume of retrieved context (top-k) leads to diminishing returns or performance degradation, often due to the LLM's inability to distinguish signal from noise within its context window. It represents a trade-off between higher recall and the cognitive load/attention dilution of the generator.
Disambiguation
Information density in LLM prompts, not color intensity or chemical concentration.
Visual Analog
A crowded cocktail party where adding more guests makes it impossible to hear the specific person you are trying to listen to.