DynaGuard: A Dynamic Guardrail Model With User-Defined Policies
Authors: name: Monte Hoover; name: Vatsal Baherwani; name: Neel Jain; name: Khalid Saifullah; name: Joseph Vincent; name: Chirag Jain; name: Melissa Kazemi Rad; name: C. Bayan Bruss; name: Ashwinee Panda; name: Tom Goldstein
Published: 2025-09-02 17:57:56

Abstract: Guardian models are used to supervise and moderate the outputs of user-facing
chatbots, enforcing guardrails and detecting bad behaviors. Standard guardian
models like LlamaGuard detect predefined, static categories of harms. We
propose dynamic guardian models that evaluate text based on user-defined
policies, making them useful for different application domains that are not
addressed by standard guardian models. Our dynamic guardian models can be used
for fast detection of policy violations or with chain-of-thought reasoning that
articulates and justifies the model outputs. Our dynamic guardian models match
static models in detection accuracy for static harm categories while
identifying violations of free-form policies with accuracy comparable to
frontier reasoning models in a fraction of the time.