Citations and grounding

Every answer from rag.ask carries the passages it came from.

answer = rag.ask("Whom did the founder of Ashford University marry?")

answer.text          # 'Eleanor Hale'
answer.sources       # ['thomas_wren.md:1-5']
answer.citations     # [Citation(path='thomas_wren.md', line_start=1, line_end=5, quote='# Thomas Wren')]
answer.grounded      # True

How citations are chosen

After the compose call, ragX checks the answer against every passage it composed over. A passage is cited when it contains the answer verbatim (ignoring case and punctuation), or when it contains at least 80% of the answer's content words. Citations point at the source file and line range, not at the internal text mirror, so path:start-end opens the right lines in your editor.

Grounded or not

answer.grounded is True only when at least one composed passage contains the answer in that sense. When none does, ragX still lists the first composed passages as citations, so you can see what the model was given, and sets grounded=False.

Treat an ungrounded answer as unsupported: the model answered from something other than the cited text, often its own memory.

Abstaining

To get a refusal instead of an ungrounded answer, set:

rag = RagX("./docs", abstain_on_weak_evidence=True)

The compose prompt then allows I don't know, and any ungrounded answer is replaced by a message saying the corpus did not contain enough evidence.

Turning the check off

verify_citations=False cites the composed passages without checking them and reports the answer as grounded whenever there are passages. Use it only when you verify answers yourself.