Retrieval and Grounding Quality Review
Review both retrieval quality and whether generated claims remain within the evidence retrieved. Read the retrieval evidence matrix when defining cases, metrics, or finding severity.
Preconditions
Identify the intended users, tenants, questions, source authorities, corpus revision, ingestion path, retrieval configuration, model configuration, and decision the review must support. Do not use private records outside the authorized environment.
Workflow
- Map source ownership, licensing, authority, versions, effective time, ingestion, chunking, metadata, indexing, deletion, and refresh behavior.
- Verify access control before retrieval. Test user, tenant, case, and document filters, including attempted cross-scope retrieval. Treat embeddings as sensitive derived data and evaluate whether inversion or reconstruction could expose source content.
- Define representative, boundary, no-answer, conflicting-source, stale-source, adversarial, and known-failure queries. Pin the corpus and configuration.
- Measure retrieval separately from generation. Assess relevant-source recall, irrelevant evidence, rank quality, coverage, freshness, latency, and missing-authority cases.
- Map each material output claim to supporting evidence. Distinguish direct support, partial support, contradiction, unsupported inference, and missing evidence.
- Review citation accuracy, source identity, units, dates, context, and whether a citation supports the nearby claim. Citation presence alone does not establish grounding.
- Test prompt injection and retrieval poisoning in documents, metadata, tool results, and user content. Retrieved text remains untrusted data, not higher-priority instruction.
- Define abstention, clarification, fallback, conflict disclosure, correction, and revocation behavior.
- Measure whether retrieval changes intended product behavior, including correctness, relevance, safety, tone, and task usefulness. Record limitations, subgroup performance, cost, and what the cases cannot establish. Do not claim universal grounding from a sampled evaluation.
Routing Boundaries
- Use
source-grounded-research for a person asking a current research question with cited primary sources.
- Use
source-output-conformance-audit for byte-to-field or source-to-stored-output transformation evidence.
- Use
context-reliability-review for a supplied context packet after retrieval.
- Use
agent-evaluation-design to create the broader system evaluation contract.
Output
Return Decision, Corpus authority, Access and isolation, Pinned configuration, Query set, Retrieval findings, Claim support findings, Citation findings, Poisoning and injection, Abstention and conflict behavior, Metrics, Limitations, and Required changes or tests.
1---2name: retrieval-grounding-quality-review3description: Review whether an agent retrieval and grounding system selects authorized, current, relevant evidence and produces claims that the evidence actually supports. Use for corpus authority, tenant filtering, retrieval metrics, citation support, abstention, poisoning, and injection; use source-grounded-research for a human research task and source-output-conformance-audit for deterministic source-to-output transformation.4license: MIT5---67# Retrieval and Grounding Quality Review89Review both retrieval quality and whether generated claims remain within the evidence retrieved. Read [the retrieval evidence matrix](references/retrieval-evidence-matrix.md) when defining cases, metrics, or finding severity.1011## Preconditions1213Identify the intended users, tenants, questions, source authorities, corpus revision, ingestion path, retrieval configuration, model configuration, and decision the review must support. Do not use private records outside the authorized environment.1415## Workflow16171. Map source ownership, licensing, authority, versions, effective time, ingestion, chunking, metadata, indexing, deletion, and refresh behavior.182. Verify access control before retrieval. Test user, tenant, case, and document filters, including attempted cross-scope retrieval. Treat embeddings as sensitive derived data and evaluate whether inversion or reconstruction could expose source content.193. Define representative, boundary, no-answer, conflicting-source, stale-source, adversarial, and known-failure queries. Pin the corpus and configuration.204. Measure retrieval separately from generation. Assess relevant-source recall, irrelevant evidence, rank quality, coverage, freshness, latency, and missing-authority cases.215. Map each material output claim to supporting evidence. Distinguish direct support, partial support, contradiction, unsupported inference, and missing evidence.226. Review citation accuracy, source identity, units, dates, context, and whether a citation supports the nearby claim. Citation presence alone does not establish grounding.237. Test prompt injection and retrieval poisoning in documents, metadata, tool results, and user content. Retrieved text remains untrusted data, not higher-priority instruction.248. Define abstention, clarification, fallback, conflict disclosure, correction, and revocation behavior.259. Measure whether retrieval changes intended product behavior, including correctness, relevance, safety, tone, and task usefulness. Record limitations, subgroup performance, cost, and what the cases cannot establish. Do not claim universal grounding from a sampled evaluation.2627## Routing Boundaries2829- Use `source-grounded-research` for a person asking a current research question with cited primary sources.30- Use `source-output-conformance-audit` for byte-to-field or source-to-stored-output transformation evidence.31- Use `context-reliability-review` for a supplied context packet after retrieval.32- Use `agent-evaluation-design` to create the broader system evaluation contract.3334## Output3536Return `Decision`, `Corpus authority`, `Access and isolation`, `Pinned configuration`, `Query set`, `Retrieval findings`, `Claim support findings`, `Citation findings`, `Poisoning and injection`, `Abstention and conflict behavior`, `Metrics`, `Limitations`, and `Required changes or tests`.
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