DynaGuard: A Dynamic Guardian Model With User-Defined Policies

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission13071 Authors

Keywords: Safety, Guardrails, Content Moderation, Compliance

TL;DR: We demonstrate the ability to perform content moderation for guardrails using only user-defined policies in a model's context window.

Abstract: Guardian models play a crucial role in ensuring the safety and ethical behavior of user-facing AI applications by enforcing guardrails and detecting harmful content. While standard guardian models are limited to predefined, static harm categories, we introduce DynaGuard, a suite of dynamic guardian models offering novel flexibility by evaluating text based on user-defined policies, and DynaBench, a dataset for training and evaluating dynamic guardian models. Our models provide both rapid detection of policy violations and a chain-of-thought reasoning option that articulate and justify model outputs. Critically, DynaGuard not only surpasses static models in detection accuracy on traditional safety categories, but is competitive with frontier reasoning models on free-form policy violations, all in a fraction of the time. This breakthrough makes DynaGuard a critical tool for language model guardrails.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 13071