2.2 — Hallucination vs. Retrieval Failure vs. Prompt Failure · Core
A hallucination is confident, fluent content with no basis in any source — and it sounds exactly as convincing as a correct answer. The diagnostic that the exam tests hardest:
"Correct docs retrieved, wrong answer" is not a retrieval problem — the retrieval succeeded. This is the most common wrong-answer distractor on the exam: don't reach for chunking or embedding fixes when the actual documents were fine.
The fix for a hallucination is grounding — never a stronger instruction. "Only report figures in the database" does not stop fabrication; requiring the model to retrieve and cite a specific record does.
2.3 — Fact-Checking at Scale: The Five-Stage Eval Workflow · Core
- Define the task — specific, measurable pass criteria.
- Build the golden dataset — real inputs including edge cases and adversarial examples; a dataset of only clean inputs predicts nothing about production.
- Run automated (code-based) checks — schema validity, required fields, exact matches. Cheapest, fastest, never drifts.
- Score with an LLM-as-judge — for behaviors needing interpretation (tone, helpfulness). The judge must be a different model than the one being evaluated, or self-preference bias inflates scores. Requires a written rubric.
- Interpret and act — aggregate scores and break them down by category.
Never tune your prompt against the same set you use to measure it — this is eval contamination: scores climb (91%) while production accuracy collapses (68%) because the prompt learned the test cases, not the task. Thresholds come from the business requirement, not from whatever the first prototype happened to score.
Judge calibration is not optional. Judge scores drift over time; periodically sample against human ratings and rewrite the rubric where they diverge. An uncalibrated judge is worse than no automated grade — it looks authoritative while being wrong.
Two credible sources disagree on a number? Include both values with their sources. Never pick one, never average them — an average is a number neither source actually reported.
2.4 — When Human Review Is Required · Core
Valid escalation triggers: low-confidence extraction (below a calibrated threshold), an ambiguous or contradictory source document, the customer explicitly asks for a human, or the request falls into a genuine policy gap.
Invalid triggers — never route on these: customer sentiment/frustration level, or the model's own self-reported confidence score. Both are documented as unreliable — an agent is frequently confidently wrong precisely on the hardest cases.
Confidence scores must be calibrated against a labeled validation set before they're used for routing at all — an uncalibrated score may route everything to review, or nothing. Even after calibration, apply stratified random sampling to the auto-accepted (high-confidence) items on an ongoing basis — this is what catches a new document format quietly producing high-confidence wrong answers.
When synthesizing multiple sources, every claim needs a claim → source mapping: URL/document name, excerpt, and publication date. A handoff payload to a human reviewer must include the input, Claude's output, the confidence score, and the specific routing reason — the reviewer should never have to reconstruct context from scratch.
Exam reflexes for Domain 2
- "Correct documents retrieved, answer still wrong" → hallucination/grounding failure, not retrieval.
- "Fix a hallucination" → grounding (retrieval, citations, verification) — never a stronger instruction.
- "97% aggregate accuracy, team removes review" → wrong — validate by segment first.
- "Judge and system-under-test are the same model" → self-preference bias; use a separate judge model.
- "Prompt tuned against the eval set, scores drop in production" → eval contamination.
- "Customer is frustrated / agent reports low confidence" → not valid escalation triggers.
- "Two sources give different numbers" → show both with attribution; never average or pick one.
- "Financial comparison output" → table. "News summary" → prose.