Safety Reconstructed: Generative Modeling via Masked Diffusion Builds Strong Safety Guardrails

Gert Lek; Abele Malan; Chaoyi Zhu; Pin-Yu Chen; Robert Birke; Lydia Chen

cs.CLSep 27, 2026

Safety Reconstructed: Generative Modeling via Masked Diffusion Builds Strong Safety Guardrails

Authors: Gert Lek, Abele Malan, Chaoyi Zhu, Pin-Yu Chen, Robert Birke, Lydia Chen

Organizations: University of Neuchâtel · Delft University of Technology · IBM Research · University of Turin

Abstract

Guard models are the last line of defense between a language model and a harmful output, yet their training objective is surprisingly narrow. Existing guards learn to predict a single verdict token from a conversational context, concentrating supervision on a single target. The consequences are structural: models latch onto shortcut features, are overconfident, and remain sensitive to where safety evidence appears in the sequence rather than its role in the full context. We propose a different framing. Rather than predicting a label from text, our LLaDA-Guard asks which label better explains the text: scoring the prompt or response under each label hypothesis and classifying based on their difference. This shifts supervision to every token in the moderated region, forcing the model to account for full content rather than its most discriminative fragments. We instantiate this idea with a masked diffusion language model, fine-tuning LLaDA-8B-Instruct with a class-conditional reconstruction objective using LoRA and requiring no architectural changes beyond the base model. LLaDA-Guard leads on average rank against discriminative baselines trained on stronger backbones across seven held-out safety benchmarks, while exhibiting substantially better confidence calibration (ECE 0.0875 vs. 0.1384 for Qwen3Guard), less over-defense on benign prompts with unsafe-looking cues, and less prompt leakage when moderating responses. Its generative nature further enables token-level risk localization as a natural byproduct, yielding a pipeline for rewriting unsafe prompts into safe equivalents without additional training and achieving a 60.7% average conversion-to-safe rate.

Figures & tables

Figure 1: Illustrative comparison between standard verdict-token moderation and our class-conditional reconstruction approach. In the standard paradigm \scalebox{0.7}{A}⃝ , the prompt and/or response is visible context and the guard predicts the masked verdict token $y$ . In our method \scalebox{0.7}{B}⃝ , a candidate label $y$ is made visible as a safety hypothesis, while the judged region is masked and reconstructed under competing safe and unsafe hypotheses. The moderation decision is therefore based on which label better explains the judged text, rather than on discriminative features for a single output token.

Figure 3: Average rank across datasets in Table 1 , over discrimination metrics (AUPRC and F1, top) and calibration metrics (Brier score and NLL, bottom). Full calibration scores are in Appendix B .

	Prompt-only datasets			Response datasets			Overall	OR
Model	ToxicChat	OpenAI Mod.	XSTest	SafeRLHF	BeaverTails	XSTest-Resp	Avg	PH Acc.
ShieldGemma 27B	63.68 / 30.18	69.05 / 50.89	82.51 / 41.22	82.09 / 28.23	79.08 / 28.53	54.58 / 34.86	71.83 / 35.65	98.03
ShieldGemma 2B	59.73 / 16.95	61.31 / 16.21	82.61 / 70.80	90.94 / 26.19	86.77 / 25.18	82.16 / 56.36	77.25 / 35.28	97.50
ShieldGemma 9B	80.03 / 68.34	88.68 / 78.93	90.98 / 81.99	88.39 / 62.66	86.84 / 68.81	91.18 / 86.67	87.68 / 74.57	89.84
Llama-Guard 4 12B	56.04 / 51.15	79.44 / 73.74	90.29 / 83.42	95.09 / 87.64	89.38 / 69.80	94.09 / 89.04	84.05 / 75.80	93.21
Llama-Guard 3 8B	57.93 / 54.03	87.30 / 79.11	97.40 / 88.41	96.66 / 88.56	89.02 / 67.76	95.71 / 90.41	87.34 / 78.05	94.80

Table 1: Values are multiplied by

100

. For the mixed datasets, each cell reports AUPRC/F1. Best numbers per metric and column are bolded. PH Acc. is PHTest over-refusal accuracy.

Figure 4: Relationship between ECE and overconfident error rate on held-out benchmarks ( Table 1 ). Overconfident errors are wrong predictions made with confidence above

90\%

. Outliers are clipped inward.

Figure 5: Effect of placing the harmful cue at different positions in the prompt, with increasing amounts of non-informative filler. A decreasing trend indicates positional sensitivity.

Figure 6: Trajectories on XSTest for LLaDA-Guard, WildGuard, and Qwen3Guard as prompts are revealed from left to right. Faint lines show individual examples; darker or thicker bands indicate overlap. Highlighted models are the top-performers in Table 1 ; full results are in Appendix Figure 9 .

Figure 7: Average conversion-to-safe rate over prompt-only datasets by rewrite budget across models. All localizers use attention saliency except LLaDA-Guard Masked (leave-one-out).

Appendix figures & tables12 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Model	ToxicChat	OpenAI Mod	XSTest	BeaverTails	XSTest-Resp	Avg
LLaDA-Guard Direct 8B	0.8163	0.8163	0.9594	0.9104	0.9412	0.8887
LLaDA-Guard 8B	0.8452	0.8568	0.9691	0.9294	0.9806	0.9162
$\Delta$	+0.0289	+0.0405	+0.0097	+0.0190	+0.0394	+0.0275

Appendix

Table 2: Direct-verdict ablation on held-out AUPRC.

\Delta

is LLaDA-Guard minus LLaDA-Guard Direct.

Model	ToxicChat	OpenAI Mod	XSTest	BeaverTails	XSTest-Resp	Avg
LLaDA-Guard Direct 8B	0.7566	0.7339	0.8855	0.7342	0.8514	0.7923
LLaDA-Guard 8B	0.7755	0.7513	0.8877	0.8329	0.9281	0.8599
$\Delta$	+0.0189	+0.0174	+0.0022	+0.0877	+0.0767	+0.0406

Appendix

Table 3: Direct-verdict ablation on held-out F1 at the default decision threshold used in evaluation.

\Delta

is LLaDA-Guard minus LLaDA-Guard Direct.

Model	ECE	Brier	NLL
ShieldGemma 2B	19.79	18.26	64.21
ShieldGemma 9B	11.90	11.85	40.35
ShieldGemma 27B	16.05	16.60	50.78
Llama-Guard 3 8B	9.51	9.84	47.37
Llama-Guard 4 12B	12.74	12.65	168.65
Granite Guardian 3.0 2B	25.77	20.71	62.58

Appendix

Table 4: Held-out-benchmark calibration summary (

\times 100

, lower is better). Avg. over ToxicChat, OpenAI Mod, XSTest, SafeRLHF, BeaverTails, XSTest-Response, PHTest Harmless.

Model	ToxicChat	OpenAI Mod	XSTest	SafeRLHF	BeaverTails	XSTest-Resp	PHTest	Avg
ShieldGemma 27B	0.0419	0.0611	0.2081	0.2936	0.3553	0.0424	0.1214	0.1605
ShieldGemma 2B	0.0950	0.2106	0.1568	0.3540	0.4236	0.0812	0.0639	0.1979
ShieldGemma 9B	0.0252	0.0878	0.1065	0.2087	0.2105	0.0603	0.1341	0.1190
Llama-Guard 4 12B	0.1179	0.1546	0.1331	0.1121	0.2707	0.0337	0.0697	0.1274
Llama-Guard 3 8B	0.0773	0.0705	0.0774	0.0741	0.2664	0.0248	0.0753	0.0951
Granite Guardian 3.0 2B	0.3849	0.2734	0.2284	0.0542	0.1762	0.0331	0.6539	0.2577

Appendix

Table 5: Held-out-benchmark expected calibration error (ECE) comparison. Avg is the mean over the displayed datasets in this table.

Figure 8: Per-model positional bias investigation. Each panel shows F1 normalized by that model’s peak F1 across input-length buckets, with curves grouped by the position of the decisive safety cue: first, middle, or last. Flat curves as filler length increases indicate less positional sensitivity.

Figure 9: Prefix-score trajectories on XSTest. Each prompt is revealed from left to right, and the guard score is recomputed after each prefix. Mean safe and unsafe trajectories summarize how quickly each model crosses the unsafe decision boundary.

Figure 10: Prefix-score jump analysis on XSTest. Curves show changes in unsafe probability between consecutive revealed-prefix steps, highlighting abrupt decision-boundary jumps.

Model	Matched $\Delta P_{\texttt{unsafe}}\downarrow$	Matched $\Delta\hat{y}_{\texttt{unsafe}}\downarrow$
LLaDA-Guard	0.099	0.060
LlamaGuard 3	0.206	0.208
LlamaGuard 4	0.138	0.132
WildGuard	0.292	0.308
GraniteGuard	0.122	0.140
Qwen3Guard	0.386	0.424

Appendix

Table 6: Response-objective fidelity on matched safe -response pairs (

n=250

). For each pair, the same safe response is attached once to a safe prompt and once to an unsafe prompt, and the model is asked to classify the response. We report the increase in unsafe probability (

\Delta P_{\texttt{unsafe}}

) and unsafe prediction rate (

\Delta\hat{y}_{\texttt{unsafe}}

) when only the prompt changes from safe to unsafe . Lower is better. Rows below the rule (ShieldGemma, NemoGuard) use a separate template for prompt and response classification, which sidesteps prompt leakage by construction and yields

\Delta\approx 0

Model	1 trigger	2 triggers	3 triggers
LLaDA-Guard	0.00% (0) conf. –	0.00% (0) conf. –	0.00% (0) conf. –
Qwen3Guard	0.00% (0) conf. –	0.88% (1) conf. 80.59%	3.54% (4) conf. 77.55%
WildGuard	0.88% (1) conf. 65.14%	0.88% (1) conf. 99.44%	2.65% (3) conf. 78.16%
Granite	1.77% (2) conf. 60.61%	5.31% (6) conf. 64.70%	10.62% (12) conf. 70.61%
NemoGuard	0.00% (0) conf. –	0.00% (0) conf. –	1.77% (2) conf. 63.69%
Llama-Guard 3	0.00% (0) conf. –	0.00% (0) conf. –	0.88% (1) conf. 90.47%

Appendix

Table 7: NotInject over-defense by trigger-count split. All examples are benign; entries show false-positive percentage with false-positive count in parentheses, plus average false-positive confidence when any false positives occur.

Figure 11: Aegis 2.0 validation performance across diffusion time-step values

t

and mask sampling repetitions

K

Localizer	B1	B2	B3	B4	B5
ShieldGemma 27B	10.9	20.9	29.8	38.8	43.4
ShieldGemma 2B	16.5	32.9	41.4	47.3	50.7
ShieldGemma 9B	12.2	21.0	27.5	32.9	40.9
Llama-Guard 4 12B	14.7	26.1	33.5	39.3	44.7
Llama-Guard 3 8B	12.4	23.0	32.6	41.7	48.6
Granite Guardian 2B	13.7	24.8	34.3	40.6	45.9

Appendix

Table 8: Dataset-balanced cumulative conversion-to-safe rate (%) by rewrite budget. B1–B5 denote increasing token-rewrite budgets; each value averages over XSTest, ToxicChat, and OpenAI Mod.

Localizer	XSTest	ToxicChat	OpenAI Mod	Avg
ShieldGemma 27B	85.0	35.1	10.1	43.4
ShieldGemma 2B	96.0	42.3	13.8	50.7
ShieldGemma 9B	77.0	34.5	11.1	40.9
Llama-Guard 4 12B	85.5	37.0	11.5	44.7
Llama-Guard 3 8B	92.0	41.4	12.4	48.6
Granite Guardian 2B	91.0	37.0	9.7	45.9

Appendix

Table 9: Conversion-to-safe rate (%) by localizer and dataset at a rewrite budget of 5.

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