← All parts of this equation

Equation 8 · Part 3 · Retrieval Is an Evidence System, Not a Memory

subscript

Zk(x)\mathcal{Z}_k(x)
subscript

What this part means

The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.

Its job in the formula

A subscript distinguishes a version, component, step, or member of a quantity. It does not automatically mean multiplication.

The passage around this formula

Read the structure rather than the arithmetic. The generator is never conditioned on the corpus. It is conditioned on z — one span, or a handful — and its output distribution is a weighted account of what those spans support. Everything outside Zk(x)\mathcal{Z}_k(x) has probability zero of influencing the answer, and the system has no representation of what it excluded. REALM made the same commitment on the training side, learning a latent retriever end-to-end so that the model attends over documents drawn from a corpus at pretraining, fine-tuning and inference time, and reporting 4–16% absolute gains on open-domain question answering over prior methods [ 2 ] .

Read this part in the article →

Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →

Sources cited in the surrounding passage

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.