ThumbGate Verification evidence
guide | proxy pointer rag guardrails

# Proxy-Pointer RAG Needs Guardrails Before Visual Answers

Proxy-pointer RAG keeps visual document systems cheaper by preserving section trees and image pointers instead of embedding every image. ThumbGate turns that structure into pre-action checks before agents answer with charts, figures, or screenshots.

👍 Thumbs up reinforces good behavior
👎 Thumbs down blocks repeated mistakes

## Why this page exists

- Document structure is a control surface: section trees, source document IDs, and image paths should travel with every answer.
- Visual answers need pointer grounding so one plausible chart from the wrong PDF cannot slip into a buyer-facing response.
- ThumbGate now maps proxy-pointer RAG signals to Document RAG Safety templates through npx thumbgate proxy-pointer-rag-guardrails.

## Why this helps ThumbGate

The commercial wedge is clear: teams want cheaper multimodal answers, but they still need proof that the visual evidence came from the right document and section.

ThumbGate does not replace multimodal embeddings. It governs the answer boundary: did the agent preserve the section tree, attach image pointers, prevent cross-document leakage, and sanity-check high-impact visual claims?

## High-ROI gates to enable

- Require section tree before multimodal answers so visual claims stay attached to document hierarchy.
- Require image pointer grounding for every cited chart, figure, or screenshot path.
- Block cross-document image leakage when the selected visual belongs to a different source document.
- Checkpoint a vision filter only when the answer makes high-impact visual claims.
- CLI path: npx thumbgate proxy-pointer-rag-guardrails --tree-path=.rag/tree.json --image-pointers=paper-1/figures/fig2.png --documents=paper-1 --visual-claims --json.

## Where this creates revenue

This gives ThumbGate a new RAG/document-AI buyer path without pretending to be a vector database. The offer is workflow hardening for one document-answering pipeline: ingestion metadata, pointer proof, answer gates, and evidence review.

## FAQ

Does ThumbGate replace multimodal embeddings?

No. ThumbGate enforces the structure around the retrieval and answer step. Teams can still use text embeddings, multimodal embeddings, or proxy-pointer RAG; ThumbGate checks whether the answer is grounded before the agent acts.

What should teams gate first in visual document RAG?

Start with section-tree presence, image pointer grounding, and cross-document leakage. Those checks are specific enough to enforce quickly and risky enough to matter.