Llama-Guard-3-8B
Version: 4
Key capabilities
About this model
Llama Guard 3 is a Llama-3.1-8B pretrained model, fine-tuned for content safety classification. Similar to previous versions, it can be used to classify content in both LLM inputs (prompt classification) and in LLM responses (response classification). It acts as an LLM – it generates text in its output that indicates whether a given prompt or response is safe or unsafe, and if unsafe, it also lists the content categories violated.Key model capabilities
The model is trained to predict safety labels on the 14 categories shown below, based on the MLCommons taxonomy of 13 hazards, as well as an additional category for Code Interpreter Abuse for tool calls use cases. The model provides content moderation in 8 languages, and was optimized to support safety and security for search and code interpreter tool calls. Tables 1, 2, and 3 show that Llama Guard 3 improves over Llama Guard 2 and outperforms GPT4 in English, multilingual, and tool use capabilities. Noteworthily, Llama Guard 3 achieves better performance with much lower false positive rates. We also benchmark Llama Guard 3 in the OSS dataset XSTest and observe that it achieves the same F1 score but a lower false positive rate compared to Llama Guard 2. Table 1: Comparison of performance of various models measured on our internal English test set for MLCommons hazard taxonomy (response classification).| F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | False Positive Rate ↓ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.877 | 0.927 | 0.081 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.939 | 0.985 | 0.040 |
| GPT4 | 0.805 | N/A | 0.152 |
| F1 ↑ / FPR ↓ | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | German | Hindi | Italian | Portuguese | Spanish | Thai | |
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.911/0.012 | 0.795/0.062 | 0.832/0.062 | 0.681/0.039 | 0.845/0.032 | 0.876/0.001 | 0.822/0.078 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.943/0.036 | 0.877/0.032 | 0.871/0.050 | 0.873/0.038 | 0.860/0.060 | 0.875/0.023 | 0.834/0.030 |
| GPT4 | 0.795/0.157 | 0.691/0.123 | 0.709/0.206 | 0.753/0.204 | 0.738/0.207 | 0.711/0.169 | 0.688/0.168 |
| Search tool calls | Code interpreter abuse | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | FPR ↓ | F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | FPR ↓ | |
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.749 | 0.794 | 0.284 | 0.683 | 0.677 | 0.670 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.856 | 0.938 | 0.174 | 0.885 | 0.967 | 0.125 |
| GPT4 | 0.732 | N/A | 0.525 | 0.636 | N/A | 0.90 |
Use cases
See Responsible AI for additional considerations for responsible use.Key use cases
As outlined in the Llama 3 paper, Llama Guard 3 provides industry leading system-level safety performance and is recommended to be deployed along with Llama 3.1. It can be used to classify content in both LLM inputs (prompt classification) and in LLM responses (response classification), providing content moderation in 8 languages, and was optimized to support safety and security for search and code interpreter tool calls.Out of scope use cases
There are some limitations associated with Llama Guard 3. First, Llama Guard 3 itself is an LLM fine-tuned on Llama 3.1. Thus, its performance (e.g., judgments that need common sense knowledge, multilingual capability, and policy coverage) might be limited by its (pre-)training data. Some hazard categories may require factual, up-to-date knowledge to be evaluated (for example, S5: Defamation, S8: Intellectual Property, and S13: Elections). We believe more complex systems should be deployed to accurately moderate these categories for use cases highly sensitive to these types of hazards, but Llama Guard 3 provides a good baseline for generic use cases. Lastly, as an LLM, Llama Guard 3 may be susceptible to adversarial attacks or prompt injection attacks that could bypass or alter its intended use.Pricing
Pricing is based on a number of factors, including deployment type and tokens used. See pricing details here.Technical specs
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Llama Guard 3 supports content safety for the following languages : English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai.Sample JSON response
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Training, testing and validation
We use the English data used by Llama Guard, which are obtained by getting Llama 2 and Llama 3 generations on prompts from the hh-rlhf dataset. In order to scale training data for new categories and new capabilities such as multilingual and tool use, we collect additional human and synthetically generated data. Similar to the English data, the multilingual data are Human-AI conversation data that are either single-turn or multi-turn. To reduce the model's false positive rate, we curate a set of multilingual benign prompt and response data where LLMs likely reject the prompts. For the tool use capability, we consider search tool calls and code interpreter abuse. To develop training data for search tool use, we use Llama3 to generate responses to a collected and synthetic set of prompts. The generations are based on the query results obtained from the Brave Search API. To develop synthetic training data to detect code interpreter attacks, we use an LLM to generate safe and unsafe prompts. Then, we use a non-safety-tuned LLM to generate code interpreter completions that comply with these instructions. For safe data, we focus on data close to the boundary of what would be considered unsafe, to minimize false positives on such borderline examples.Distribution
Distribution channels
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Safety techniques
Llama Guard 3 is a Llama-3.1-8B pretrained model, fine-tuned for content safety classification. Similar to previous versions, it can be used to classify content in both LLM inputs (prompt classification) and in LLM responses (response classification). It acts as an LLM – it generates text in its output that indicates whether a given prompt or response is safe or unsafe, and if unsafe, it also lists the content categories violated. Llama Guard 3 was aligned to safeguard against the MLCommons standardized hazards taxonomy and designed to support Llama 3.1 capabilities. Specifically, it provides content moderation in 8 languages, and was optimized to support safety and security for search and code interpreter tool calls. The model is trained to predict safety labels on the 14 categories shown below, based on the MLCommons taxonomy of 13 hazards, as well as an additional category for Code Interpreter Abuse for tool calls use cases| Hazard categories | ||
|---|---|---|
| S1: Violent Crimes | S2: Non-Violent Crimes | |
| S3: Sex-Related Crimes | S4: Child Sexual Exploitation | |
| S5: Defamation | S6: Specialized Advice | |
| S7: Privacy | S8: Intellectual Property | |
| S9: Indiscriminate Weapons | S10: Hate | |
| S11: Suicide & Self-Harm | S12: Sexual Content | |
| S13: Elections | S14: Code Interpreter Abuse | |
Safety evaluations
Note on evaluations: As discussed in the original Llama Guard paper, comparing model performance is not straightforward as each model is built on its own policy and is expected to perform better on an evaluation dataset with a policy aligned to the model. This highlights the need for industry standards. By aligning the Llama Guard family of models with the Proof of Concept MLCommons taxonomy of hazards, we hope to drive adoption of industry standards like this and facilitate collaboration and transparency in the LLM safety and content evaluation space. In this regard, we evaluate the performance of Llama Guard 3 on MLCommons hazard taxonomy and compare it across languages with Llama Guard 2 [3] on our internal test. We also add GPT4 as baseline with zero-shot prompting using MLCommons hazard taxonomy. Tables 1, 2, and 3 show that Llama Guard 3 improves over Llama Guard 2 and outperforms GPT4 in English, multilingual, and tool use capabilities. Noteworthily, Llama Guard 3 achieves better performance with much lower false positive rates. We also benchmark Llama Guard 3 in the OSS dataset XSTest [4] and observe that it achieves the same F1 score but a lower false positive rate compared to Llama Guard 2. Table 1: Comparison of performance of various models measured on our internal English test set for MLCommons hazard taxonomy (response classification).| F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | False Positive Rate ↓ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.877 | 0.927 | 0.081 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.939 | 0.985 | 0.040 |
| GPT4 | 0.805 | N/A | 0.152 |
| F1 ↑ / FPR ↓ | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | German | Hindi | Italian | Portuguese | Spanish | Thai | |
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.911/0.012 | 0.795/0.062 | 0.832/0.062 | 0.681/0.039 | 0.845/0.032 | 0.876/0.001 | 0.822/0.078 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.943/0.036 | 0.877/0.032 | 0.871/0.050 | 0.873/0.038 | 0.860/0.060 | 0.875/0.023 | 0.834/0.030 |
| GPT4 | 0.795/0.157 | 0.691/0.123 | 0.709/0.206 | 0.753/0.204 | 0.738/0.207 | 0.711/0.169 | 0.688/0.168 |
| Search tool calls | Code interpreter abuse | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | FPR ↓ | F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | FPR ↓ | |
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.749 | 0.794 | 0.284 | 0.683 | 0.677 | 0.670 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.856 | 0.938 | 0.174 | 0.885 | 0.967 | 0.125 |
| GPT4 | 0.732 | N/A | 0.525 | 0.636 | N/A | 0.90 |
Known limitations
There are some limitations associated with Llama Guard 3. First, Llama Guard 3 itself is an LLM fine-tuned on Llama 3.1. Thus, its performance (e.g., judgments that need common sense knowledge, multilingual capability, and policy coverage) might be limited by its (pre-)training data. Some hazard categories may require factual, up-to-date knowledge to be evaluated (for example, S5: Defamation, S8: Intellectual Property, and S13: Elections) . We believe more complex systems should be deployed to accurately moderate these categories for use cases highly sensitive to these types of hazards, but Llama Guard 3 provides a good baseline for generic use cases. Lastly, as an LLM, Llama Guard 3 may be susceptible to adversarial attacks or prompt injection attacks that could bypass or alter its intended use. Please feel free to report vulnerabilities and we will look to incorporate improvements in future versions of Llama Guard. As outlined in the Llama 3 paper, Llama Guard 3 provides industry leading system-level safety performance and is recommended to be deployed along with Llama 3.1. Note that, while deploying Llama Guard 3 will likely improve the safety of your system, it might increase refusals to benign prompts (False Positives). Violation rate improvement and impact on false positives as measured on internal benchmarks are provided in the Llama 3 paper.Acceptable use
Acceptable use policy
The provider has not supplied this information.Quality and performance evaluations
Source: Meta Note on evaluations: As discussed in the original Llama Guard paper, comparing model performance is not straightforward as each model is built on its own policy and is expected to perform better on an evaluation dataset with a policy aligned to the model. This highlights the need for industry standards. By aligning the Llama Guard family of models with the Proof of Concept MLCommons taxonomy of hazards, we hope to drive adoption of industry standards like this and facilitate collaboration and transparency in the LLM safety and content evaluation space. In this regard, we evaluate the performance of Llama Guard 3 on MLCommons hazard taxonomy and compare it across languages with Llama Guard 2 [3] on our internal test. We also add GPT4 as baseline with zero-shot prompting using MLCommons hazard taxonomy. Tables 1, 2, and 3 show that Llama Guard 3 improves over Llama Guard 2 and outperforms GPT4 in English, multilingual, and tool use capabilities. Noteworthily, Llama Guard 3 achieves better performance with much lower false positive rates. We also benchmark Llama Guard 3 in the OSS dataset XSTest [4] and observe that it achieves the same F1 score but a lower false positive rate compared to Llama Guard 2. Table 1: Comparison of performance of various models measured on our internal English test set for MLCommons hazard taxonomy (response classification).| F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | False Positive Rate ↓ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.877 | 0.927 | 0.081 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.939 | 0.985 | 0.040 |
| GPT4 | 0.805 | N/A | 0.152 |
| F1 ↑ / FPR ↓ | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | German | Hindi | Italian | Portuguese | Spanish | Thai | |
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.911/0.012 | 0.795/0.062 | 0.832/0.062 | 0.681/0.039 | 0.845/0.032 | 0.876/0.001 | 0.822/0.078 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.943/0.036 | 0.877/0.032 | 0.871/0.050 | 0.873/0.038 | 0.860/0.060 | 0.875/0.023 | 0.834/0.030 |
| GPT4 | 0.795/0.157 | 0.691/0.123 | 0.709/0.206 | 0.753/0.204 | 0.738/0.207 | 0.711/0.169 | 0.688/0.168 |
Table 3: Comparison of performance of various models measured on our internal test set for other moderation capabilities (prompt+response classification).
| Search tool calls | Code interpreter abuse | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | FPR ↓ | F1 ↑ | AUPRC ↑ | FPR ↓ | |
| Llama Guard 2 | 0.749 | 0.794 | 0.284 | 0.683 | 0.677 | 0.670 |
| Llama Guard 3 | 0.856 | 0.938 | 0.174 | 0.885 | 0.967 | 0.125 |
| GPT4 | 0.732 | N/A | 0.525 | 0.636 | N/A | 0.90 |
Task | Capability | Non-Quantized | Quantized | ||||||
| Precision | Recall | F1 | FPR | Precision | Recall | F1 | FPR | ||
| Prompt Classification | English | 0.952 | 0.943 | 0.947 | 0.057 | 0.961 | 0.939 | 0.950 | 0.045 |
| Multilingual | 0.901 | 0.899 | 0.900 | 0.054 | 0.906 | 0.892 | 0.899 | 0.051 | |
| Tool Use | 0.884 | 0.958 | 0.920 | 0.126 | 0.876 | 0.946 | 0.909 | 0.134 | |
| Response Classification | English | 0.947 | 0.931 | 0.939 | 0.040 | 0.947 | 0.925 | 0.936 | 0.040 |
| Multilingual | 0.929 | 0.805 | 0.862 | 0.033 | 0.931 | 0.785 | 0.851 | 0.031 | |
| Tool Use | 0.774 | 0.884 | 0.825 | 0.176 | 0.793 | 0.865 | 0.827 | 0.155 | |
Benchmarking methodology
Source: Meta In order to produce classifier scores, we look at the probability for the first token, and use that as the "unsafe" class probability. We can then apply score thresholding to make binary decisions.Public data summary
Source: Meta The provider has not supplied this information.Model Specifications
LicenseCustom
Last UpdatedJanuary 2026
ProviderMeta
Languages1 Language