Definition
In RAG and agentic systems, explainability is the capability to provide a transparent audit trail linking a generated output to its retrieved source chunks and the specific reasoning steps taken by the model. It involves surfacing metadata, citation markers, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces to prove that a response is grounded in factual context rather than being a hallucination.
Refers to tracing retrieval provenance and logic paths, not the internal mathematical weights of the neural network.
"A Legal Brief with Footnotes: Every assertion made by the lawyer points directly to a specific page and line number in the discovery evidence folder."
- Source Attribution(Component)
- Chain-of-Thought (CoT)(Prerequisite)
- Hallucination(Inverse Risk)
- Faithfulness Metric(Evaluation Method)
Conceptual Overview
In RAG and agentic systems, explainability is the capability to provide a transparent audit trail linking a generated output to its retrieved source chunks and the specific reasoning steps taken by the model. It involves surfacing metadata, citation markers, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces to prove that a response is grounded in factual context rather than being a hallucination.
Disambiguation
Refers to tracing retrieval provenance and logic paths, not the internal mathematical weights of the neural network.
Visual Analog
A Legal Brief with Footnotes: Every assertion made by the lawyer points directly to a specific page and line number in the discovery evidence folder.