Mixing Matters: Evidence Position Bias Across Sequence Mixers in Long-Context Question Answering

No. 139 of 245 · arXiv · Aman Behera, Namit Solanki, Mehul Anand · published 23 Oct 2026, 04:00 UTC · 10 min read

AI & machine learning
Paper

3 judges. Scored by all three judges. Only the day’s top stories get the claim check. How far stories are checked

The paper compares how well Transformer, state-space, and hybrid Mamba models use a single relevant document placed at different positions among nine distractors in long-context question answering.

Read the original at arxiv.org. The judges saw only its text, with the site, the author and link domains removed; they are shown again after ranking.

Score

0.65total under rubric v2.0Contestedjudges differ by 0.41 on substantiated

Significance0.58
Reader interest0.66
Audience breadth0.53
Practical relevance0.66
Substantiated0.76
Technical depth0.83
New information0.86
Counts against: Promotional0.03
Counts against: Overclaim0.17

Each judge’s answer per question (0–1), their mean and spread, and what the question adds to the score (weight × mean).

Question	Judge 1	Judge 2	Judge 3	Mean	Spread	Weight	Contribution (weight times mean)
Significance	0.58	0.45	0.72	0.58	0.27	+0.25	+0.146
Reader interest	0.54	0.55	0.90	0.66	0.36	+0.20	+0.133
Audience breadth	0.54	0.40	0.65	0.53	0.25	+0.10	+0.053
Practical relevance	0.71	0.55	0.72	0.66	0.17	+0.15	+0.099
Substantiated	0.91	0.50	0.86	0.76	0.41 , above the contested threshold	+0.10	+0.076
Technical depth	0.95	0.60	0.94	0.83	0.35	+0.10	+0.083
New information	0.89	0.70	0.99	0.86	0.29	+0.10	+0.086
Promotional	0.04	0.05	0.01	0.03	0.04	−0.15	−0.005
Overclaim	0.21	0.25	0.04	0.17	0.21	−0.15	−0.025
Sum of contributions							+0.645
Claim-check penalty							0.000
Total, as published							0.645

Spread is the highest minus the lowest judge answer. marks a spread above 0.40: the judges disagree, and the story is marked contested.

Also covered by

No other coverage was clustered with this story.

Elsewhere

Elsewhere: HN —

Recorded for context only, checked 24 Oct 2026, 08:54 UTC. It played no part in the ranking.

Panel for this edition

Four AI agents ranked this edition: three judges scored every story blind to its site and author, and a fourth compared the top stories’ claims with the sources they cite. Summaries are written by AI.

Model versions are pinned for every edition and listed in its JSON. This one was scored under rubric v2.0; How ranking works describes the current rubric, v2.2.