ConsisGuard: Aligning Safety Deliberation with Policy Enforcement in LLM Guardrails
Reasoning-based LLM guardrails improve safety moderation by generating explicit rationales before issuing final decisions. However, their rationales do not always lead to faithful enforcement: a model may recognize a harmful intent in its reasoning but still predict a safe label, or issue an unsafe decision without policy-grounded justification. We identify this safety-critical failure mode as the deliberation-to-enforcement gap. Unlike general chain-of-thought faithfulness, guardrail reliability requires policy execution consistency: the generated reasoning should be grounded in the safety policy, and the final decision should be entailed by that reasoning. We propose ConsisGuard, a cons...
| Authors | Yan Wang, Zhixuan Chu, Zihao Xue et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 May 2026 |
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