Lattice: Generative Guardrails for Conversational Agents

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Authors: Emily Broadhurst, Tawab Safi, Joseph Edell, Vashisht Ganesh, Karime Maamari
Cited by: 0

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