What the documents look like
Supplier entry settlement in the supermarket and convenience-store category turns on four document types: the procurement contract, the delivery acceptance note, the rebate agreement, and the statement of account. These materials draw on ERP purchasing, the supplier portal, POS sales, and the finance system, and they refresh weekly or monthly. Compared with concession counters in large hypermarkets, this settlement work generally involves purchase-and-sale or consignment payables and does not necessarily include on-site operation, so the correspondence between contract clauses and acceptance documents forms the main line of reconciliation. Settlement errors can produce account disputes, supplier suspension of delivery, and exposure to fair-trading requirements.
For citation tracing, the practical consequence is that any answer or handover statement must be traceable to the wording of a specific material. The knowledge base search node outputs a citation array whose length may be zero; an empty array does not mean the workflow has errored and terminated. Knowledge bases selected together must use the same vector model, and libraries built on different vector models cannot be associated in one search. During reconciliation, verify the identifier first, exclude the non-conforming library, and record what was actually observed. The minimum relevance value is a filter threshold and does not perform permission or entity isolation; a retrieval result is not an authorization credential. Hybrid retrieval merges multiple result paths through RRF, and the rerank score can be used for filtering; these are ranking processes inside the retrieval step.
Hypothetical drill sample: the material wording is "Party A and Party B signed the 2025 annual procurement contract, with a payment term of 60 days and rebates settled quarterly." and "The delivery acceptance note records arrival of 200 cases on 5 March 2025, accepted as qualified." The draft sentence to be judged is "The supplier's March 2025 payment was settled in accordance with the contract." Neither the contract nor the acceptance note states that settlement was completed, so this draft sentence is unsupported and remains to be verified. A separate handover request, "Please process the March payment based on the above materials," is in a pending-review state; pending review does not demonstrate the absence of operating permission, and it does not constitute payment execution.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The primary task is comparing contract and transaction materials while preserving traceability to source wording. Retrieval returns citation content; it does not approve payment, write to a database, or synchronize with an external system. Those business actions require separately connected downstream implementation. A citation array of length zero is carried through the output chain, so the downstream design must be checked for how it handles an empty array rather than assuming an error.
Documented retrieval conditions still apply. The search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that share the same vector model. Hybrid retrieval combines vector and full-text recall through RRF, and reranking produces a score between 0 and 1 that can be used for filtering. The minimum relevance value takes effect only under semantic retrieval or when reranking is used, and it is a filter threshold rather than a final ordering rule. Because retrieval may fuse several recall paths, the final citation content is not necessarily ordered strictly by a single vector similarity.
The optional paths shown in the overall retrieval flow are not executed on every request. Image retrieval requires image input and corresponding model capability; reranking requires a rerank model and must be enabled by configuration. Cross-model association is not permitted, so the check is to verify identifiers, exclude the non-conforming library, and record the actual observation. Judging whether a draft sentence conflicts with source material requires the same subject, the same period, and the same field; only clearly mutually exclusive values in that field constitute a conflict. Where the material is silent, or where only related-stage evidence exists, the result is unsupported or pending verification.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting point for this drill | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Select only the settlement materials library using the same vector model | Compare the vector model identifier item by item against the already selected library and exclude non-conforming ones |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Compare hit behaviour on numbered and model-type queries against semantic retrieval used alone |
| Citation limit | A value set for this drill | Compare against another value in the drill and observe how the length of citation content changes |
| Minimum relevance | A value set for this drill | Compare against another value in the drill and observe filtering of low-relevance results |
| Result reranking | Enabled according to configuration | Compare candidate ordering against the disabled state and confirm the rerank model is available |
| Citation output handover | Check that the citation array is passed into the answering step | Compare each answer sentence against the corresponding source wording |
Three common errors
- Treating a retrieval hit as business authorization. Retrieval returns citation content only; payment, approval, database writes, and external synchronization each require separately connected system implementation, and a retrieval result is not a permission credential.
- Associating knowledge bases across vector models. Libraries built on different vector models cannot be associated together. Verify the identifier first and exclude non-conforming libraries; do not run a cross-model retrieval to compare missed recall.
- Judging an unstated fact as a conflict. A conflict requires clearly mutually exclusive values for the same subject, the same period, and the same field. Where the material does not state that settlement was completed, record the result as unsupported or pending verification.
How to verify the setup
- Input the material wording above together with the draft sentence, and compare whether the draft sentence is supported by the source wording. The source does not state that settlement was completed, so the expected result is unsupported; it must not be judged as a conflict or as a negation.
- Input the pending-review payment request above, and compare the request state against the conditions for execution. Pending review does not constitute approval, so the expected result is pending verification; the output must not state that payment was executed.
- Input an explicitly paper-based empty citation array, and compare the downstream handover design. An empty array does not trigger an error termination, so the expected result is that downstream handles it as an empty citation; whether an actual retrieval returns an empty array still needs to be recorded from observation.