Audit-grade citations — making AI decisions reviewable
Citations are how Vihaya makes LLM output reviewable. Not ‘trust the model’ — ‘here is the policy text the model read, and here is the conclusion it drew’. The pattern is simple to describe and rare to implement correctly. Here’s what audit-grade means in practice.
Where citations land in the data model
Each Vihaya decision is designed to carry pointers to the source passages the agent grounded on. Reviewers, regulators, and the customer’s audit tooling can join the decision back to the verbatim source text whenever they need to. Implementation details stay between Vihaya and the design-partner customer.
This is the architectural answer to the regulator‘s question: ’show me why this decision was made‘. The audit chain isn’t a separate system you fall back on — it’s the system you operate.
Citations FAQ
What’s an audit-grade citation?
A pointer from a decision back to the exact source passage the agent grounded on. In Vihaya, each decision is designed to carry citation pointers that dereference to the verbatim text the agent read.
Isn’t this just RAG?
RAG retrieves; citations record what was retrieved and acted on. They’re related but not the same. A poorly-designed RAG system retrieves chunks but never records which ones the model actually grounded on — so the audit chain is implicit at best.
How do you enforce that the agent actually used the cited passages?
Two ways: prompt the model to return citation IDs as part of its structured output, and score citation grounding in the eval gate. If the model returns ‘approve’ with no citations, the eval gate penalises the score.
What about hallucinated citations?
Real risk. The defence is that every citation ID must exist in the retrieved set — IDs that didn’t come back from retrieval are filtered out before the decision row is written. The model can hallucinate text; it can’t hallucinate IDs that came from the database.
Want to see this in your environment?
30-minute discovery call. We follow up with a draft SOW shortly after.
Talk to us about a pilot