Definition
Plain language
A document that looks relevant to a question but doesn't actually contain the answer.
As stated in the literature
In retrieval and contrastive learning, a candidate that is superficially similar to the target but is not a correct match; used to stress-test whether a system genuinely verifies evidence.
Also called: hard negatives
Why it matters: These tempting look-alikes test whether a system really verifies its evidence or just grabs whatever superficially matches.
For example, a search returns an article titled almost exactly like the question but which never actually states the answer.
Heard on the show
“And some are what's called "hard negatives" — documents that look plausibly relevant, that share words and themes with the question, but that don't actually contain the answer.”Episode 092 — When Search Agents Don't Really Search: The Memory Shortcut Hiding in Browsing Benchmarks