grounding

Definitions

1. The technique of connecting an LLM's outputs to verifiable external data sources to reduce hallucinations and improve factual accuracy. Grounding typically involves retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, or citation of specific documents during inference.

   In plain English: Tying an AI's answers to real, checkable sources so it makes fewer things up.

   Example: We added grounding to our customer support bot by connecting it to our knowledge base, and hallucination rates dropped from 12% to under 2%.

Related Terms

• Hallucination
• RAG
• Embedding
• benchmark contamination
• guardrails
• retrieval