Lesson 4.222mAdvanced4.4k students

Handling the no-answer case

The hardest behaviour to get is a clean "I don’t know". Make it an explicit, allowed output instead of the model’s last resort.

This lesson sits in Grounded Generation, part of Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Scratch. It assumes what came before it and leads directly into the next lesson in the module.

In this lesson you will

  • Detect when retrieval returned nothing relevant
  • Make abstaining an explicit, acceptable outcome
  • Offer a next step instead of a dead end

Pro tip

An empty state that points somewhere useful beats a fabricated answer every single time.

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