Lesson 4 of 7 · About 3 minutes
Make the answer earn your trust
Match a claim to a relevant source and spot what remains unknown.
01 / Learn the idea
Evidence before confidence
A model's learned knowledge is not a live copy of your school's documents. Retrieval finds relevant material to use when generating an answer. Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, combines this material with a language model. The original RAG paper explored this approach using a searchable collection of Wikipedia passages.[1]
Grounding connects a response to supporting information. Citations make that connection inspectable: you can open the source and compare it with the claim. Check who produced the source, whether it applies to this question, and whether the cited passage actually supports the answer. A link beside a sentence is not proof by itself.[2]
Suppose last year's club notice says Friday, while this year's signed notice says Thursday. The older document might be real yet irrelevant to this year's meeting. If neither document gives a room number, the honest answer leaves the room unknown and asks for the missing information.
Original school example
A missing room
Source: the current school notice names Thursday at 4 pm but no room. Supported answer: Thursday at 4 pm. Unsupported addition: Room 204. Search for the room separately or say it is not established.
The source may be outdated, irrelevant, or misread. Check the specific claim against the actual passage.
02 / Explore the flow · Guided simulation
A real passage can still be the wrong evidence
A fictional school policy changes on September 1. Find the rule for a September 15 event, then check whether the required approval is present.
Original fictional scenario. Decisions are authored; calculations and checks run in your browser. No live AI or external action.
↳ A failed check can send the flow back to another action—or to a human.
Step 1 of 4 · Visible system event
Question
What does the fictional policy require for the September 15 event?
Inspect the visible trace (1 events)
- Question
What does the fictional policy require for the September 15 event?
This log shows authored actions, tool results, and checks. It is not a model’s private reasoning.
03 / Check your understanding
A current notice confirms a club meeting on Thursday but says nothing about the room. Which answer is supported?
Where these ideas come from
Primary sources, explained in our own words. Research findings and engineering guidance are different kinds of evidence; neither is a guarantee that an agent will succeed.
Supports: Combining retrieved documents with text generation.
Limit: NeurIPS 2020 research on particular models and datasets. Retrieval is not a guarantee of factual correctness.
Supports: Connecting answer passages to source citations.
Limit: Explains source attribution in a product. A citation still needs checking against the claim it accompanies.
Stemtiq original lesson · Sources checked September 12, 2026 · Editorial review pending. School examples and guided simulations are original simplifications, not replications of the cited systems. No research affiliation or endorsement is implied.