grounding
The process of basing all or part of an LLM's response on information retrieved from one or more trusted sources.
Plain English Explanation
The process of basing all or part of an LLM's response on information retrieved from one or more trusted sources. For example, suppose a user prompts an LLM for today's weather forecast in Berlin. The LLM might ground the response on information it gathers from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a common grounding technique.
How is it used?
Practitioners refer to grounding when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.