LLMs, GenAI, RAG, agents, evaluation · insight-0518
Verify every identifier the model emits against the system of record
- Evidence type
- practitioner heuristic
- Difficulty
- easy
- Roles
- Applied AI, ML engineer
- Industries
- aviation, retail
Summary: situation, action, reason, boundary
Situation
An assistant drafts rebooking notes that include flight numbers, fare basis codes and policy section numbers.
Action
Extract identifiers into schema fields, look each one up in the system of record (schedule, fare database, policy index), and block or flag outputs with unresolved identifiers.
Reason
A generated identifier follows the right pattern because the model learned the format, not because it looked anything up; a plausible format is not evidence of existence.
Boundary
Flight numbers, SKUs, account IDs, legal citations, paper references, URLs.
Symptom or risk
Some codes look valid but do not exist or belong to another route, and agents paste them into customer records.
Exceptions
Identifiers copied from the provided context can be checked by string match against that context.
Trade-offs
Lookups add latency and coupling to internal systems.
Pitfalls
Validating identifiers with a regular expression only.