GA_Guard_Lite

Introducing the GA Guard series — a family of open-weight moderation models built to help developers and organizations keep language models safe, compliant, and aligned with real-world use.

GA-Guard is designed to detect violations across the following seven categories:

• Illicit Activities – instructions or content related to crimes, weapons, or illegal substances.
• Hate & Abuse – harassment, slurs, dehumanization, or abusive language.
• PII & IP – exposure or solicitation of sensitive personal information, secrets, or intellectual property.
• Prompt Security – jailbreaks, prompt-injection, secret exfiltration, or obfuscation attempts.
• Sexual Content – sexually explicit or adult material.
• Misinformation – demonstrably false or deceptive claims presented as fact.
• Violence & Self-Harm – content that encourages violence, self-harm, or suicide.

The model outputs a structured token for each category (e.g., <policy_violation> or <policy_not_violation>).

[!Note] Important: This model outputs special tokens (e.g. <hate_and_abuse_not_violation>). Do not use pipeline("text-generation") since it strips them by default. Always decode with skip_special_tokens=False to preserve the outputs.

Model Details

GA Guard Lite features:

• Type: Causal Language Model
• Training: Full finetune
• Number of Parameters: 0.6B
• Number of Non-Embedding Parameters: 0.44B
• Number of Layers: 28
• Context Length: 262,144 tokens

Inference Examples

Transformers Library

# Load model directly
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("GeneralAnalysis/GA_Guard_Lite")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("GeneralAnalysis/GA_Guard_Lite")

messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]

# The chat template automatically adds the guardrail system prompt and prefixes user messages with "text:".
inputs = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
    tokenize=True,
    return_dict=True,
    return_tensors="pt",
).to(model.device)

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=40)

# Decode only the newly generated tokens
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:]))

# Sample output:
# <hate_and_abuse_not_violation><illicit_activities_not_violation>...

Benchmarks

We evaluated GA Guards on public moderation suites (OpenAI Moderation, WildGuard Benchmark, and HarmBench), our adversarial GA Jailbreak Bench, and the new GA Long-Context Bench. Across all three, our models consistently outperform major cloud guardrails and even surpass GPT-5 (when prompted to act as a guardrail).

Public Benchmarks

On public moderation suites, Guard Thinking reports 0.906 F1, Guard 0.899, and Lite 0.875 — all higher than GPT-5 (0.864) and GPT-5-mini (0.852), with cloud guardrails in the 0.62–0.74 range.

GA Long-Context Bench

On GA Long-Context Bench (up to 256k tokens), GA Guard Thinking scores 0.893 F1, GA Guard 0.891, and Lite 0.885. Cloud baselines collapse: Vertex 0.560, AWS misclassifies nearly all inputs with a 1.0 false-positive rate, and Azure records just 0.046 F1.

GA Jailbreak Bench

On GA Jailbreak Bench, which measures resilience against adversarial attacks, Guard Thinking achieves 0.933 F1, Guard 0.930, and Lite 0.898. GPT-5 reaches 0.893, while cloud guardrails fall significantly lower.

Licensing

This model is a fine-tune of Qwen3-4B, which is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 by Alibaba Cloud.
The upstream license text is included in this repository as LICENSE.Apache, and attribution is provided in the NOTICE file.

GA Guard Lite in this repository is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license for non-commercial use.

• Free for research, experimentation, and non-commercial internal use
• No commercial or production deployment without a separate commercial license

For commercial / production use, please contact info@generalanalysis.com to obtain a paid license and support agreement.

Citation [optional]

@misc{generalanalysis2025gaguardcore,
      title        = {GA Guard Lite}, 
      author       = {Rez Havaei and Rex Liu and General Analysis},
      year         = {2025},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/GeneralAnalysis/GA_Guard_Lite}},
      note         = {Open-weight moderation model for seven safety categories},
}