Guardrail

How it is used

Usually plural: teams add, test and tune guardrails on both the input and the output side. Guardrails can be simple rules, classifier models or a second LLM that checks the first. The word comes from the metal barriers along roads.

Example sentences

1. The guardrails block any answer that contains a credit card number.

2. After launch we retuned the guardrails, because they were also blocking normal medical questions.

Common collocations

• add guardrails
• safety guardrails
• input and output guardrails
• guardrail model

Related terms

• red teamingTesting a model or AI system by deliberately trying to make it fail or behave harmfully, in order to find weaknesses before real users or attackers do.
• alignmentMaking an AI system's behavior match human intentions and values, so that it is helpful and honest and avoids causing harm. Also the research field that studies this.
• system promptInstructions given to a chat model before the conversation starts, which set its role, rules, tone and limits for all the messages that follow.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• guardrail · Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

More terms: Machine Learning and Data Processing

• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• model
• dataset
• training data
• label
• train
• supervised learning
• neural network
• deep learning
• loss function
• overfitting