technical documentation teams

Abstract: Large language models now generate code, documentation, and analyses, and are increasingly used to review such output. We ask when a second review by a different model helps. Building on the author's earlier preprints, which varied context, repetition, and role structure within one model, we test model independence in a controlled experiment: 30 artifacts with 150 planted errors, 10 review conditions, and 900 review sessions with three reviewer models from two developers. In this experiment, (1) a top-tier cross-model reviewer is not significantly different in F1 from same-model review in a fresh session (CCR), which does not establish equivalence; (2) the two find partly different errors (Jaccard 41.2%); and (3) at two review calls, one CCR plus one cross-model review matches more planted errors than two CCR reviews (56.7% vs. 42.7%; Holm-adjusted p=.006), but not significantly more than two reviews by the top-tier cross-model reviewer, so model difference and reviewer capability are not separated. A lightweight cross-model reviewer scores no higher than same-model review. Withholding requirements from the reviewer raises F1 for the two lower tiers but not the top tier, in untested point estimates whose pattern depends on how failed sessions are scored. Before analysis we audited all session records, excluding one baseline run of uncertain provenance and 14 failed calls; results with all sessions are also reported. A partial check on public detector outputs from another benchmark neither replicates nor contradicts the main comparison. Records, artifacts, and scripts are available from the author on request.

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interfaces for information retrieval, but they remain prone to hallucinations and faithfulness errors, in which the generated answers diverge from the retrieved evidence. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and recent hybrid or semi-extractive approaches mitigate this issue, they do not guarantee that quoted or extracted spans are verbatim from the retrieved context. This limitation can have severe consequences in safety-critical domains, where answers must exactly match certified documentation. We introduce Constrained Hybrid Decoding (CHyD), a novel faithfulness-first paradigm for speculative RAG. While traditional speculative decoding is optimized for inference speed, CHyD repurposes this architecture to ensure faithful verbatim evidence extraction when the extraction mode is correctly triggered. Our approach enforces hard decoding constraints that restrict generation to continuous spans present in the retrieved documents. This design provides a robust but straightforward guarantee: any explicitly quoted span in the output appears verbatim in the provided context. We evaluate our method across state-of-the-art LLMs on diverse abstractive, extractive, and semi-extractive QA benchmarks, including technical datasets motivated by aircraft maintenance. Results show that existing hybrid methods frequently hallucinate quoted spans, with exact extraction accuracy dropping below 40% in technical domains. In contrast, our approach achieves near-perfect extraction faithfulness regardless of the model used. Although enforcing hard constraints introduces a trade-off with fluency-oriented metrics, our method improves exact answer correctness and remains competitive overall, highlighting its suitability for safety-critical information retrieval applications.

Abstract: The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is a cornerstone of Industry 4.0 and the Digital Product Passport, providing standardized digital representations of industrial assets. While manufacturers already maintain extensive technical product documentation, generating AAS instances from existing product datasheets remains a labor-intensive task because technical information is extracted from heterogeneous document structures and often involves company-specific terminology and conventions. In this work, we present AAS-RAIL, a retrieval-augmented information extraction (IE) approach that automatically generates Asset Administration Shells from PDF product datasheets using large language models (LLMs). Instead of relying on a fixed set of few-shot examples, the proposed retrieval-augmented in-context learning (RAIL) approach retrieves LLM-generated extraction helpers from similar Asset Administration Shells to provide instance-specific in-context learning (ICL). This enables the model to adapt its extraction behavior to company-specific naming conventions and formatting styles without fine-tuning. Our core contribution is the dynamic selection of company-specific AAS examples for each datasheet, replacing static prompting with an extraction pipeline that adapts to instances and combines semantic retrieval and structured information extraction. The proposed approach is evaluated on a collection of industrial product datasheets using a selection of open- and closed-weight LLMs. Experimental results show that RAIL consistently improves extraction quality over conventional few-shot prompting, yielding relative improvements of 30.4-52.4%. These results demonstrate that our approach provides an effective improvement for company-specific AAS generation.