What the documents look like
Cross-border product compliance work happens before listing and before import. The core activity is checking product safety evidence and label content against destination-market requirements. The materials come from platform policy centers, testing laboratory reports, destination-country regulation libraries, and supplier files. Day-to-day documents include product test reports, English-language labels, MSDS files, and platform prohibited-item lists. Updates are irregular; each new listing can introduce a new version of any of these documents.
For product data and selection questions, citation tracing faces a specific problem: an answer must point back to a specific passage in a specific document, while the document itself may already have been replaced by a newer version. Within these materials, a test report carries a report number, test items, standard version, and issue date; an English label carries a label version and applicable market; an MSDS carries a revision number. These fields form the smallest unit of traceability. When any field is absent, whether that material can serve as a citation source remains unknown.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The knowledge base search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that share the same vector model, and outputs cited content as an array whose length may be 0. An empty array means the output path still completes; it does not by itself indicate that the workflow errored out. The cited content then goes to the answering step, where each answer sentence is checked against the cited source text.
The minimum relevance value is a filter threshold and takes effect only under semantic retrieval or when result reranking is used. It does not perform permission or entity isolation. The same-vector-model requirement applies to knowledge base association and does not extend to external business-registration sites or other systems. RRF is the fusion process for mixed retrieval results, not a switch that can be turned on. Thinking budget and citation token limit are different parameters and cannot substitute for each other.
Hypothetical paper exercise sample
The following material is fictional and used only to explain the checking method on this page.
Source text one: "Report number LAB-2024-0871, product is a portable power bank, test item is battery overcharge protection, standard version IEC 62133-2:2017, issue date 12 March 2024, applicable market is the European Union."
Source text two: "English label version EN-LBL-03, applicable market is the European Union, label states rated capacity 10000mAh, warning text includes 'Do not expose to fire', label status is pending supplier confirmation."
A draft sentence to be assessed: "This power bank has passed EU battery safety testing, the label has been confirmed compliant, and listing can be arranged."
The draft sentence covers two distinct facts: the test report has been issued, and the label status is pending supplier confirmation. Pending confirmation does not constitute confirmed. The draft sentence presents a pending status as confirmed compliance, which goes beyond what the source text supports.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration or check item | Hypothetical starting point for this exercise | Reason for the choice and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Select knowledge bases holding test reports and label materials that share the same vector model | Check that the knowledge base identifier and vector model identifier match; do not associate across different models |
| Search mode | Use semantic retrieval together with full-text retrieval | Report numbers and standard versions suit full-text hits; label descriptions suit semantic hits |
| Minimum relevance | Hypothetical starting value 0.5 | This value is a starting point for this exercise; compare returned item counts against 0.4 and 0.6 and record the observation |
| Citation limit | Hypothetical starting value 2000 tokens | This value is a starting point for this exercise; compare citation completeness against 1000 and 3000 tokens |
| Question optimization | The sample question is explicit, so leave it off for now | Compare retrieval time and hit content for the same question with it on and off |
| Cited content handoff | Pass the citation array to the answering step | Check each answer sentence against the cited source text for subject, object, and status |
The values in the table are hypothetical starting points for this exercise and are not official defaults. The citation limit uses tokens as its unit and is unrelated to thinking budget.
Three common errors
- Treating a pending status as confirmed. The draft sentence says "the label has been confirmed compliant," while source text two says "label status is pending supplier confirmation." The input is the two source texts and the draft sentence; the comparison is the label status field; when the observation shows "pending" and "confirmed" differ, that sentence is not supported.
- Treating retrieval results as authorization. The search node returning a citation array means only that content was retrieved, not that the product has been approved for listing. The input is the citation array and a listing request; the comparison is whether an authorization record exists; when no authorization record is provided, the request remains pending verification.
- Associating knowledge bases that use different vector models. The input is two knowledge base identifiers and their vector model identifiers; the comparison is whether the two match; when the identifiers differ, exclude that knowledge base and do not run cross-model retrieval to compare missed recalls.
How to verify the setup
- Use source text one together with the "has passed EU battery safety testing" portion of the draft sentence. The input is the report number, test item, standard version, and issue date; the comparison is whether the draft sentence subject and the report subject are the same product and the same market; when the observation shows the subject and market match and the report has been issued, that portion is supported by the source text.
- Use source text two together with the "label has been confirmed compliant" portion of the draft sentence. The input is the label version, applicable market, and label status; the comparison is whether "pending supplier confirmation" and "confirmed" are mutually exclusive values of the same field; when the observation shows the status field is pending, that portion is not supported and is recorded as pending verification.
- Use a paper input of an empty citation array to check the downstream answering step design. The input is an explicitly labelled
[]; the comparison is whether the downstream step continues on empty citations; when the observation shows the downstream step does not halt and does not produce a conclusion without a source, the empty-result handoff matches the design. This check does not claim that a fictional retrieval necessarily returns an empty array.