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arXiv · 2601.17481

Lattice: Generative Guardrails for Conversational Agents

Emily Broadhurst·Tawab Safi·Joseph Edell·Vashisht Ganesh·Karime Maamari
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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.

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Emily Broadhurst, Tawab Safi, Joseph Edell, Vashisht Ganesh, Karime Maamari. 2026-01-24. Lattice: Generative Guardrails for Conversational Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17481

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