When Are Reasoning-Based Guardrails Not Efficient? ResponseGuard: A Fast Vision-Language Guard for Real-Time Moderation

ResponseGuard is a 2B vision-language safety guard for real-time moderation that scores the image, request, and reply in a single forward pass.

On benchmark tests, it detected harmful responses better than a 3B reasoning-based guard while running about 150 times faster.

It can also inspect generated text token by token, allowing unsafe output to be stopped early.

The result suggests lightweight non-reasoning guardrails can be cheaper and faster without sacrificing safety performance.