DuoGuard: A Two-Player RL-Driven Framework for Multilingual LLM
  Guardrails
Authors: name: Yihe Deng; name: Yu Yang; name: Junkai Zhang; name: Wei Wang; name: Bo Li
Published: 2025-02-07 18:45:03

Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has increased the need
for guardrail models to ensure responsible use, particularly in detecting
unsafe and illegal content. While substantial safety data exist in English,
multilingual guardrail modeling remains underexplored due to the scarcity of
open-source safety data in other languages. To address this gap, we propose a
novel two-player Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, where a generator and a
guardrail model co-evolve adversarially to produce high-quality synthetic data
for multilingual guardrail training. We theoretically formalize this
interaction as a two-player game, proving convergence to a Nash equilibrium.
Empirical evaluations show that our model \ours outperforms state-of-the-art
models, achieving nearly 10% improvement over LlamaGuard3 (8B) on English
benchmarks while being 4.5x faster at inference with a significantly smaller
model (0.5B). We achieve substantial advancements in multilingual safety tasks,
particularly in addressing the imbalance for lower-resource languages in a
collected real dataset. Ablation studies emphasize the critical role of
synthetic data generation in bridging the imbalance in open-source data between
English and other languages. These findings establish a scalable and efficient
approach to synthetic data generation, paving the way for improved multilingual
guardrail models to enhance LLM safety. Code, model, and data will be
open-sourced at https://github.com/yihedeng9/DuoGuard.