Lattice: Generative Guardrails for Conversational Agents
Abstract
Conversational AI systems require guardrails to prevent harmful outputs, yet existing approaches use static rules that cannot adapt to new threats or deployment contexts. We introduce Lattice, a framework for self-constructing and continuously improving guardrails. Lattice operates in two stages: construction builds initial guardrails from labeled examples through iterative simulation and optimization; continuous improvement autonomously adapts deployed guardrails through risk assessment, adversarial testing, and consolidation. Evaluated on the ProsocialDialog dataset, Lattice achieves 91% F1 on held-out data, outperforming keyword baselines by 43pp, LlamaGuard by 25pp, and NeMo by 4pp. The continuous improvement stage achieves 7pp F1 improvement on cross-domain data through closed-loop optimization. Our framework shows that effective guardrails can be self-constructed through iterative optimization.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Publication details
- Journal / source
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Publication date
- 24 January 2026
- Document type
- Preprint