← Back to Library

AprielGuard

Authors: Jaykumar Kasundra, Anjaneya Praharaj, Sourabh Surana, Lakshmi Sirisha Chodisetty, Sourav Sharma, Abhigya Verma, Abhishek Bhardwaj, Debasish Kanhar, Aakash Bhagat, Khalil Slimi, Seganrasan Subramanian, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, Ranga Prasad Chenna, Srinivas Sunkara

Published: 2025-12-23

arXiv ID: 2512.20293v2

Added to Library: 2026-01-07 10:08 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Safeguarding large language models (LLMs) against unsafe or adversarial behavior is critical as they are increasingly deployed in conversational and agentic settings. Existing moderation tools often treat safety risks (e.g. toxicity, bias) and adversarial threats (e.g. prompt injections, jailbreaks) as separate problems, limiting their robustness and generalizability. We introduce AprielGuard, an 8B parameter safeguard model that unify these dimensions within a single taxonomy and learning framework. AprielGuard is trained on a diverse mix of open and synthetic data covering standalone prompts, multi-turn conversations, and agentic workflows, augmented with structured reasoning traces to improve interpretability. Across multiple public and proprietary benchmarks, AprielGuard achieves strong performance in detecting harmful content and adversarial manipulations, outperforming existing opensource guardrails such as Llama-Guard and Granite Guardian, particularly in multi-step and reasoning intensive scenarios. By releasing the model, we aim to advance transparent and reproducible research on reliable safeguards for LLMs.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of AprielGuard, a unified safeguard model for detecting safety risks and adversarial threats in large language models.
  • Model architecture with 8 billion parameters trained on diverse datasets, facilitating robust detection in standalone prompts, multi-turn conversations, and agentic workflows.
  • Improved interpretability through structured reasoning traces, allowing for better transparency in decision-making processes.
  • Performance evaluation demonstrates superior results against leading open-source models like Llama-Guard and Granite Guardian in both safety and adversarial contexts.
  • Framework and model released to promote reproducible research and further development in AI safety.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

The research on AprielGuard demonstrates a significant advancement in the development of reliable safeguards for large language models, addressing both safety and adversarial vulnerabilities in a unified manner. This comprehensive approach enhances the models' effectiveness across various contexts and lays groundwork for future innovations in AI safety.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is highly relevant to AI security researchers as it tackles critical challenges in content moderation for large language models, combining safety risk detection and adversarial attack identification into a single framework. The insights and methodologies proposed can inform future research, improve existing models, and establish standards for responsible AI deployment, particularly as conversational AI systems become more integrated into society.

📚 Read the Full Paper