Definition
A control flow mechanism in agentic workflows and iterative RAG pipelines that terminates reasoning or retrieval loops as soon as a sufficiency heuristic or confidence threshold is satisfied. It balances the trade-off between execution latency and token cost against the potential for marginal accuracy gains from further iterations.
In this context, it refers to runtime inference and agentic recursion control, not the machine learning training technique used to prevent model overfitting.
"An Express Elevator that stops exactly at the requested floor instead of continuing to the top of the building to check every level."
- Agentic Loop(Context)
- Confidence Scoring(Trigger)
- Max Iterations(Guardrail)
- Hallucination Detection(Prerequisite)
Conceptual Overview
A control flow mechanism in agentic workflows and iterative RAG pipelines that terminates reasoning or retrieval loops as soon as a sufficiency heuristic or confidence threshold is satisfied. It balances the trade-off between execution latency and token cost against the potential for marginal accuracy gains from further iterations.
Disambiguation
In this context, it refers to runtime inference and agentic recursion control, not the machine learning training technique used to prevent model overfitting.
Visual Analog
An Express Elevator that stops exactly at the requested floor instead of continuing to the top of the building to check every level.