What the documents look like
Daily operations for a Tmall flagship store draw on four document families for inventory procurement and supplier material: product publishing pages, brand authorization letters, delivery commitment records, and after-sales work orders. Brand authorization and flagship-store identity are checked closely by the platform, and the direct consequences of an error include product delisting, delayed-shipment compensation, and a decline in store rating. The brief states that this material updates daily and per order, so the retrieval step faces authorization files that are continually appended and fulfillment records produced order by order.
A brand authorization letter carries a licensor, a licensee, an authorized product category, and an authorization validity period. A delivery commitment record carries the promised dispatch window that the store has published. A procurement handover note is a working draft that may state a supplier relationship in its own words. These documents sit in the same retrieval scope but differ in what they can support. A retrieval hit returns reference content; it does not decide whether an authorization is valid, whether a supplier qualification holds, or whether a procurement approval has been granted.
Constraints at the retrieval step
The knowledge base search node can associate one or more knowledge bases that use the same vector model. Knowledge bases built on different vector models cannot be associated together. The search unit is the knowledge base; a collection only classifies data and does not affect search results. Semantic retrieval, full-text retrieval, and hybrid retrieval serve different question types. Hybrid retrieval combines the vector and full-text result sets through RRF, and result reranking requires a rerank model and must be enabled by configuration. The minimum relevance value takes effect only under semantic retrieval or when result reranking is used. The reference cap is measured in tokens, not in a top-k item count. An empty reference output is a valid array of length zero, so the downstream branch still runs when nothing is retrieved.
Retrieval and recall do not perform authorization judgment and do not constitute a supplier qualification conclusion or a procurement approval. A request that is pending is not an approval. An offered option is not an execution. An unsigned termination is not a completed termination.
Hypothetical paper test case. A flagship store knowledge base holds a brand authorization letter reading: "Licensor: A Brand Management Co., Ltd.; Licensee: B E-Commerce Co., Ltd.; Authorized product category: household cleaning appliances; Authorization valid until March 31, 2026." A separate procurement handover draft sentence reads: "Company B has obtained a long-term authorization from Brand A across all categories and may procure and list products on its own." The pending request is: write the draft sentence into the supplier material knowledge base and mark it as verified.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting value for this trial | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Supplier material base, authorization letter base | Both bases use the same vector model; check the vector model identifier of each and exclude any that does not match |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | The authorization letter contains proper names and a date; compare retrieved content across semantic, full-text, and hybrid modes |
| Reference cap | 800 tokens | Hypothetical starting value; test content completeness with authorization letter excerpts of different lengths, compared against 400 and 1200 |
| Minimum relevance | 0.35 | Hypothetical starting value; label relevant and irrelevant samples first, then compare filtering results against 0.2 and 0.5 |
| Question optimization | Enabled | Handover questions often omit the subject; compare the original question with the optimized question and check whether the subject was changed incorrectly |
| Result reranking | Enabled | When candidates are numerous, filter by rerank score and compare ordering before and after enabling |
The reference cap is a token budget for cited content and is separate from the thinking budget of a reasoning model. The minimum relevance value is a filtering threshold, not a final ordering rule. After question optimization, hybrid retrieval, image retrieval, or result reranking is enabled, the final result may pass through multi-path fusion and does not necessarily follow a single vector similarity ordering. Image retrieval requires an image input and the corresponding model capability; reranking requires a rerank model and must be enabled by configuration. These optional paths in the documented flow are not executed on every request.
Three common errors
- Treating a retrieval hit as an authorization confirmation. The authorization letter states a specific category and a validity end date of March 31, 2026. The draft sentence states a long-term authorization across all categories. The two statements take mutually exclusive values on the same fields of authorized category and validity period, so the draft sentence is unsupported by the source text.
- Treating a pending request as already executed. The request to write the draft sentence and mark it as verified has no approval record. Its status is pending verification and cannot be inferred as verified or as rejected.
- Forcing an association across vector models. When the vector model identifiers of the two knowledge bases do not match, attempting to associate them together is a configuration error. The correct action is to check the identifiers, exclude the mismatched base, and record the actual observation.
How to verify the setup
- Enter the authorization letter text and the draft sentence. Compare the authorized product category field and the authorization validity period field. When the draft sentence and the source text take mutually exclusive values on these fields, the draft sentence is judged unsupported, and the evidence gap is retained. No approval record exists, so no verified status applies.
- Enter the pending request from the procurement handover note. Compare the request status field. With no approval record, the status is judged pending verification, and it is not judged as executed or as rejected.
- Enter the vector model identifiers of the two knowledge bases. Compare whether the identifiers match. When they do not match, exclude that base and record the observation; do not run a cross-model retrieval comparison of missed recalls. For the empty-result branch, a paper input of [] can be used to check the downstream design, without claiming that a fictional rule retrieval necessarily returns [].
These checks observe input, comparison, and observable result. They do not claim that any test, deployment, approval, refund, or other business action has occurred. Where the source documents do not state a system error code or an automatic business action, that information remains unknown.