Grounding Instructions

Also known as: context-grounding prompt

Grounding instructions explicitly direct the model to base its answer solely on the provided context and to avoid introducing information from parametric memory. Common formulations include 'Answer only using the documents below' or 'If the answer is not in the provided context, say you do not know.' These instructions reduce hallucination in retrieval-augmented applications and make faithfulness easier to evaluate, though sufficiently strong parametric knowledge can sometimes override them.