Triaging Threats to Specialized Guardrails

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 29 May 2026] Triaging Threats to Specialized Guardrails Wenjie Jacky Mo, Xiaofei Wen, Rui Cai, Boyu Zhu, Sicong Jiang, Zihan Wang, Minglai Yang, Zhe Zhao, Muhao Chen Building robust safety guardrails is essential for deploying Large Language Models across diverse real-world applications. However, this goal remains challenging because safety risks span heterogeneous threat domains, while existing datasets cover only fragmented risk subsets and rely on inconsistent taxonomies. Consequently, it remains unclear whether current guardrails can generalize beyond narrow evaluation settings. To better understand the robustness of guardrail models, we first introduce GuardZoo, a unified human-annotated benchmark with 32,460 samples covering 15 distinct unsafe categories. Evaluation on GuardZoo reveals that monolithic guardrails suffer from task interference: different threat domains require distinct decision boundaries that are difficult to compress into a single model. We therefore propose RouteGuard, a router-expert framework that triages each conversation to specialized expert guardrails for threat-specific detection. Experiments show that RouteGuard improves fine-grained threat detection over strong guardrail baselines, generalizes better under out-of-domain evaluation, and supports flexible modular expansion to emerging threats. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2605.30693 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.30693v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.30693 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Wenjie Jacky Mo [view email] [v1] Fri, 29 May 2026 00:36:48 UTC (2,989 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)