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NeMo Guardrails: A Toolkit for Controllable and Safe LLM Applications with Programmable Rails

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arxiv 2310.10501 v1 pith:ZS5HIE76 submitted 2023-10-16 cs.CL cs.AI

classification cs.CLcs.AI
keywords guardrailsprogrammablerailsapplicationsnemocontrollabledevelopersdialogue
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

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NeMo Guardrails is an open-source toolkit for easily adding programmable guardrails to LLM-based conversational systems. Guardrails (or rails for short) are a specific way of controlling the output of an LLM, such as not talking about topics considered harmful, following a predefined dialogue path, using a particular language style, and more. There are several mechanisms that allow LLM providers and developers to add guardrails that are embedded into a specific model at training, e.g. using model alignment. Differently, using a runtime inspired from dialogue management, NeMo Guardrails allows developers to add programmable rails to LLM applications - these are user-defined, independent of the underlying LLM, and interpretable. Our initial results show that the proposed approach can be used with several LLM providers to develop controllable and safe LLM applications using programmable rails.

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Cited by 26 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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  4. Geometry-Guided Constraint Learning for LLM Safety Classification

    cs.AI 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

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  8. Unified Multi-Task Learning & Model Fusion for Efficient Language Model Guardrailing

    cs.CL 2025-04 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Small discriminative classifiers trained on synthetic guardrail data, plus a bandit-based model merging search, beat GPT-4-level moderation systems on multiple safety benchmarks.

  9. Adversarial Reasoning at Jailbreaking Time

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    A loss-guided 'reason, verify, search' loop with three LLM modules surpasses prior semantic jailbreak methods on several defended models.

  10. Aegis2.0: A Diverse AI Safety Dataset and Risks Taxonomy for Alignment of LLM Guardrails

    cs.CL 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Aegis2.0 provides a commercially usable, human-annotated safety dataset with 24 risk categories, and models trained on it with parameter-efficient methods match WildGuard and beat Llama Guard 3.

  11. A Flexible Large Language Models Guardrail Development Methodology Applied to Off-Topic Prompt Detection

    cs.CL 2024-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A synthetic-data-driven method trains lightweight classifiers to flag user prompts as off-topic relative to a system prompt, outperforming heuristics and partially transferring to jailbreak and harmful content.

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  19. OneShield -- the Next Generation of LLM Guardrails

    cs.CR 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

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  20. JavelinGuard: Low-Cost Transformer Architectures for LLM Security

    cs.LG 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A study of five small transformer classifier architectures for LLM jailbreak and prompt injection detection claims low-latency accuracy comparable to large models, led by the multi-task Raudra design.

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    A random forest on Snowflake embeddings detects jailbreak prompts with F1 0.96 on JailbreakHub, but the high score depends on training on the same in-the-wild jailbreak source used in that benchmark.

  23. The Hitchhikers Guide to Production-ready Trustworthy Foundation Model powered Software (FMware)

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    The paper catalogs the lifecycle stages and production-readiness challenges of software built around foundation models (FMware) and proposes an action plan of engineering practices and research directions.

  24. Bridging the Safety Gap: A Guardrail Pipeline for Trustworthy LLM Inferences

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    A guardrail pipeline combining detection, retrieval grounding, rule-based wrappers, and a repair model is reported to match OpenAI moderation and fix 80.7 percent of hallucinated HaluEval answers.

  25. Challenges in Guardrailing Large Language Models for Science

    cs.AI 2024-11 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

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