What the documents look like
A brand concession inside a shopping mall sits on two settlement paths at once. The mall collects sales through its own POS and applies a concession-rate deduction; the brand runs its own ERP for stock and supplier records. Procurement and supplier material therefore draws on four document families: the joint-operation concession contract, mall activity letters, sales receipts, and monthly reconciliation statements. The contract fixes the parties, the validity window and the deduction terms. The monthly reconciliation statement carries the sales amount and the rate applied. Activity letters describe what the mall offers or approves for a given period. Sales receipts are the transaction-level originals.
These materials refresh daily from mall POS and monthly from the finance system. For citation tracing, the working question is narrow: can each figure and clause in a procurement or supplier record be returned to a specific location in one of those four documents, with the same subject, the same period and the same field.
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 citations as an array whose length may be zero. A zero-length array still lets the downstream branch run. Two consequences follow for this category. First, before any comparison, confirm which knowledge bases are selected and which document version they hold; knowledge bases built on different vector models cannot be associated together. Second, a retrieval hit is candidate source text only. It is not procurement authorization, not supplier admission and not approval of a deduction settlement.
The minimum relevance value is a filter threshold on a zero-to-one scale, effective only in semantic retrieval or when result reranking is used. It does not separate one concession from another, and it does not isolate unauthorized supplier records. A high similarity score does not make a supplier record valid for the current concession. Image retrieval requires an image input and matching model capability; reranking requires a rerank model and must be enabled in settings. Optional paths drawn in the overall retrieval diagram are not executed on every request.
Assume a paper exercise. A concession manager drafts a procurement handover request: "Based on the March 2025 monthly reconciliation statement, add spring stock from Supplier A." The material available for checking reads: "Joint-operation concession contract No. LX-2025-014, signed by the brand and the mall, valid 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2025." "The March 2025 monthly reconciliation statement records concession sales of RMB 86,400 for the month; the deduction rate follows Appendix 2 of the contract." The sentence to be judged is: "This additional purchase has mall activity resource support and can proceed directly." The evidence needed is whether the activity letter original names this concession, this period and this purchase item, and whether that authorization is in an approved state. If the letter does not name them, or sits only at the application stage, the draft sentence is unsupported.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration or check item | Hypothetical starting point for this exercise | Reason and comparison object |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Select the knowledge base holding the concession contract and monthly reconciliation statement under one vector model | Compare against a knowledge base identifier built on a different vector model, and exclude it from joint association |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Compare against semantic retrieval alone on contract-number matching |
| Citation limit | Set, for this exercise, to a token volume covering one full monthly reconciliation statement | Compare against a smaller value covering only a single receipt, and observe whether the citation is truncated |
| Minimum relevance | Keep at its existing setting, without adjusting first | Compare against a raised value and the resulting recall count, to confirm the filter's scope |
| Result reranking | Observe when a rerank model exists and reranking is enabled in settings | Compare against candidate ordering with reranking not enabled, and record the actual observation |
| Citation handoff | Pass each search output item back to the answer step and check it against the source text | Compare against judging only by answer fluency, and check whether the citation array is empty |
Three common errors
- Treating a retrieval hit as procurement authorization. Input: the draft sentence above together with the activity letter original. Compare whether the letter names this concession, this period, this item and an approval status. Observable result: when the letter does not name them, record only that support is absent; do not record approval.
- Treating minimum relevance as a supplier isolation control. Input: supplier records belonging to another concession inside the same knowledge base. Compare whether retrieval results are filtered by concession scope. Observable result: the relevance score does not distinguish concession ownership, so the valid scope of the record must be checked separately.
- Treating an activity letter under review as an effective resource. Input: an activity letter at the application stage together with the draft sentence. Compare the letter's status field. Observable result: application stage does not equal approval, and the phrase "has support" in the draft lacks a basis.
How to verify the setup
- Input the March 2025 monthly reconciliation statement text and the draft sentence from the exercise above. Compare whether the citation array contains that statement text. The condition is met when the array holds the source text and the answer corresponds to it item by item; when the array is empty, record the gap and do not treat the point as verified.
- Input concession contract number LX-2025-014. Compare the hit location when the search mode is hybrid retrieval. The condition for number-type checking is met when the contract number is recalled and the source text is traceable; when it is not recalled, record the actual observation and do not infer that the contract does not exist.
- Input the activity letter original and the draft sentence. Compare the subject, period, item and approval status named in the letter. The draft sentence is supported only when all four match and the status is approved; if any item is missing or the status is application stage, record it as pending verification and keep the evidence gap open.
A paper input of an empty citation array can be used to check downstream design, without claiming that any particular query returns an empty array. Retrieval checks describe observations and failure branches; they do not guarantee a first-position hit, full recall, or an empty result for an unrelated query.