The paper introduces COLAGUARD, a guardrail model that embeds multi-step safety reasoning into a continuous latent space, allowing efficient hidden-state propagation during inference. Compared to existing methods, COLAGUARD achieves an 8.24‑point macro‑F1 improvement over Llama Guard 3 and matches the explicit reasoning baseline GuardReasoner, while delivering a 12.9× speedup and a 22.4× reduction in token usage across ten moderation settings and eight safety benchmarks.
By Siddharth Sai, Xiaofei Wen, Muhao Chen
arXiv:2607. 17575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose ARBITER, a novel LLM guardrail framework that introduces two key ideas: (i) dual-hypothesis reasoning, a reasoning method for LLM guardrails that explicitly considers both safe and unsafe interpretations of a prompt before making a safety decision, and (ii) multi-component supervised fine-tuning (MC-SFT), a structured training loss for reasoning-based guardrails that decomposes LLM outputs into logical components and weights them according to their importance.
By Md Asiful Islam, Mihai Surdeanu
TRACE is a new benchmark that evaluates the safety of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) across the entire inference pipeline, including prompts, reasoning traces, and final responses. It provides prompts in two languages covering nine risk categories and ten attack strategies, and for each prompt four LRMs generate traces and responses that are annotated for safety with supporting evidence extracted from the source text. Evaluation of 18 guardrail models on TRACE shows that detecting unsafe content in reasoning traces is much harder than in prompts or final responses, and that current models struggle to extract the necessary evidence.
By Zhenyu Wu, Siyuan Chen, Changchun Yang, Jiaqi Dong, Min Zhou, Ali Almadan, Talal Hammad, Faisal Wahbo, Aminullah Tora, Mona Alshahrani, Xin Gao
arXiv:2606. 16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries.
By Ke Miao, Jiaxin Li, Hongliang Chen, Yuke Hu, Zhan Qin
arXiv:2608. 15673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model guardrails can be viewed as policy-consistency problems: a system must determine which policy-relevant facts hold in a prompt-response pair and what those facts imply under a given policy.
By Satchit Chatterji, Shihan Wang, Giovanni Sileno, Erman Acar
arXiv:2602. 13562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While reasoning models have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, their increasing power necessitates stringent safety measures.
By Yanbo Wang, Minzheng Wang, Jian Liang, Lu Wang, Yongcan Yu, Ran He