Glossary · H
Terms starting with H
6 of 250 glossary terms. Each entry links to its own page with why it matters and where it fits.
Definitions here are written for engineers, not grammarians: what the term means, why it matters when it comes up, and where it sits in the curriculum — most term pages name the lessons that lean on the concept, so you can jump from a definition straight to the teaching. Use the letter bar below to move through the alphabet, or press the slash key to search the whole corpus directly.
Every entry carries three things besides the definition: the plain aliases it travels under (listed as “also”), a category tag for which stretch of the curriculum it belongs to, and the cross-references that place it next to its neighbors — the terms you would meet in the same lesson. A term earns a page here only when a lesson in the curriculum actually uses it, so the corpus stays the shape of the material instead of the shape of a dictionary.
One honest way to use this page: read down the list of entries below and note every term you could not define in a sentence if a colleague asked. That list — not the whole letter — is your revision list, and each entry links to the reading that closes the gap.
HNSW
also: Hierarchical Navigable Small World
Retrieval & generation
An approximate-nearest-neighbor index that organizes vectors in layered proximity graphs and searches from coarse upper layers toward detailed lower layers.
Hallucination
Evaluation & safety
Generated content that is false, unsupported by the available evidence, or inconsistent with the task's source of truth. It can arise even when the output is fluent and the model is not attempting to deceive.
Handoff
AI-native development
A structured transfer of a task between people or agents that preserves the objective, current state, evidence, decisions, constraints, and remaining work.
Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)
also: Human oversight, human review
Agents & tools
A workflow design in which a person supplies judgment, correction, approval, or escalation at defined points in an AI-driven process.
Hybrid Retrieval
Retrieval & generation
Retrieval that combines signals from different methods, commonly lexical matching and dense-vector similarity, before merging or reranking results.
Hyperparameter
Math & training
A configuration choice that shapes model structure, optimization, data processing, or inference rather than being learned as an ordinary model parameter. Examples include learning rate, batch size, layer count, and decoding settings.