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ACL Findings2026

LS-Guard: Adaptive Safety Guardrails Tailored to Individual LLMs

Jinggui Liang, Lizi Liao

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at diverse tasks, but remain vulnerable to malicious inputs such as jailbreak attacks.Current onesize-fits-all safety guardrails built from static datasets ignore each model's unique safety profile and often force trade-offs between safety and utility.To address this gap, we propose LS-Guard, a framework for learning model-specific guardrails tailored to each LLM's vulnerabilities.LS-Guard operates in two stages: First, it dynamically profiles a given LLM by probing it with malicious prompts to elicit the model's responses, which are then dynamically labeled to reveal model-specific failure modes.Second, it uses this data to train a safety classifier with a collaborative multi-LoRA architecture.An orthogonality-constrained multi-task loss enables a central expert to learn general safety features while each subject-specific expert encodes the distinctive vulnerability patterns of one LLM.During inference, LS-Guard activates the central expert together with its modelspecific expert to perform content moderation, yielding reliable safety decisions.Extensive experiments on multiple real-world LLMs demonstrate that LS-Guard significantly outperforms strong baseline guardrails, achieving superior robustness, adaptability, and generalization.1 WARNING: This paper may contain offensive or sensitive content.

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