What the documents look like
Tmall flagship store daily operations are grounded in brand authorization, flagship store identity, and platform compensation rules. Materials are scattered across the Tmall merchant backend, the Tmall rules center, ERP order tables, and customer service chat records. This page handles the product listing page, the brand authorization letter, the shipping commitment record, and the after-sales work order. These materials update daily or per order.
The core difficulty in comparing contracts and transaction materials is that the same material may be cited in several places. The commitment on the product listing page, the valid scope of the authorization letter, the time limit in the shipping commitment record, and the handling conclusion in the after-sales work order each need to be traced back to the original text line by line. When the material version and authorization status are unclear, citation tracing can only record the gap. It cannot substitute for an audit conclusion.
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 it outputs a citation array whose length may be zero. Even when no content is found, the output path still runs through. An empty citation array does not mean the workflow has errored or terminated.
Search results need to be passed to the answering step, and the answer must be checked against the cited original text item by item. Semantic recall and relevance scores do not perform permission or entity isolation. Retrieval itself does not constitute authorization. Knowledge bases with different vector models cannot be associated together. The vector model identifier should be checked first and non-matching bases excluded, with actual observations recorded. Cross-model retrieval should not be executed to compare missed recalls.
Image retrieval requires image input and model capability. ReRank requires a model and must be enabled per settings. The optional paths shown in the overall document flow diagram do not mean every request executes all of them. Thinking budget is a model thinking configuration and is unrelated to the citation token limit.
Configuration and implementation checks
The following configuration concerns the hypothetical drill sample on this page. It lists only officially documented settings or implementation check items. The values are starting points for this hypothetical trial, not official defaults.
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting point | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Only the contract material base with a matching vector model identifier | Check selected knowledge bases and material versions first; exclude those with a non-matching vector model |
| Search mode | Hybrid search | Contract clauses contain both numbers and natural language; compare semantic and full-text recall paths |
| Result ReRank | Enabled; compare ReRank scores per settings | Secondary sorting when candidates are many; compare against results without ReRank |
| Citation limit | Hypothetical starting point of 800 tokens | Set by contract paragraph length; compare against the actual length of a single contract before adjusting |
| Minimum relevance | Hypothetical starting point of 0.4 | Compare against 0.3 and 0.5; observe whether filtered citations still contain the target clause |
| Citation content output | Pass the citation array to the answering step | Check that the answer corresponds item by item to the cited original text |
Three common errors
- Treating a retrieval hit as authorization confirmation. Input a retrieval request for a brand authorization letter and compare the retrieval output against the authorization status field. Retrieving the authorization letter text does not mean the authorization is valid for the target period. The valid scope must be checked separately.
- Treating an empty citation array as a workflow fault. Input the explicit paper input [] and compare whether the downstream node continues to execute. The output path running through satisfies the condition. An empty array should not be used to infer that retrieval rules necessarily return empty.
- Treating a relevance score as a permission filter. Input a cross-store material query and compare the returned records against the access scope. A high or low score does not exclude unrelated or unauthorized records. When access rights are missing, record the gap.
How to verify the setup
Hypothetical drill sample: the material original text reads "Party A authorizes Party B to sell designated brand products on the Tmall platform, with an authorization period from January 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025" and "Party B shall ship within 48 hours after the buyer pays." The draft sentence to be judged is "The store may sell designated brand products during the authorization period and promises 48-hour shipping." The subjects are Party A and Party B. The objects are designated brand products and the shipping commitment. The period is the 2025 calendar year. The authorization boundary is sales on the Tmall platform.
- Input the material original text above and the draft sentence. Compare whether the subjects, objects, period, and platform scope of the draft sentence match the original text. All four elements corresponding satisfies the condition.
- Input the draft sentence "The store may sell the brand indefinitely." Compare it against the authorization period field in the original text. A draft sentence extending beyond December 31, 2025 is unsupported and requires recording the evidence gap.
- Input a pending handover request: "Please execute shipping compensation according to the effective authorization." Compare the request status against the authorization effective evidence. Pending review does not equal an effective authorization. When effective evidence is missing, keep the item as pending verification.
The public technical facts checked for this feature, used to identify relevant content in the documents and not required to be copied as a fixed five-row table, are: associated knowledge bases check selected bases and material versions first, and only the same vector model can be associated together; citation content output is a citation array whose length may be zero, and an empty array does not mean the workflow has errored or terminated; citation input handover checks whether retrieval output is passed to the answering step and whether the answer is checked item by item against the cited original text; citation display verification uses traceable samples to check the original text display and does not replace source evidence with thinking process or answer fluency; material timeliness verification uses current and historical document versions to test the source, and whether a citation is adopted still depends on the effective version audit.