Shieldstral

Antonia Calvi, Avinash Sooriyarachchi, Giada Pistilli, Guillaume Lample, Maarten Buyl, Maximilian Augustin, Maximilian Müller, Pierre Stock, Tom Bewley, Wassim Bouaziz, Yimu Pan

Shieldstral: 21 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #10 of 29 papers on 2026-07-29. Day-by-day upvote history. It lost 5 votes when the Hub removed votes in bulk.

We introduce Shieldstral, a 3B-parameter policy-adaptive multimodal safety classifier that matches or outperforms models nearly 7times its size on text safety benchmarks and sets a new state of the art on multimodal safety classification. Shieldstral formulates content moderation as a binary question-answering task. This simple formulation unifies diverse moderation tasks into a single yes/no problem, enabling heterogeneous safety datasets with divergent taxonomies to be consolidated under one training framework. We present the data construction recipe, covering curation and generation of approximately 54.1M samples and a fine-grained evaluation set to evaluate policy adaptability. Together, these enable a small adaptive model to match or outperform much larger models.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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