Shh, don't say that! Domain Certification in LLMs
Cornelius Emde, Alasdair Paren, Preetham Arvind, Maxime Guillaume Kayser, Tom Rainforth, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Philip Torr, Adel Bibi
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are often deployed to do constrained tasks, with narrow domains. For example, customer support bots can be built on top of LLMs, relying on their broad language understanding and capabilities to enhance performance. However, these LLMs are adversarially susceptible, potentially generating outputs outside the intended domain. To formalize, assess and mitigate this risk, we introduce domain certification; a guarantee that accurately characterizes the out-of-domain behavior of language models. We then propose a simple yet effective approach dubbed VALID that provides adversarial bounds as a certificate. Finally, we evaluate our method across a diverse set of datasets, demonstrating that it yields meaningful certificates.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
emde2025shh,
title={Shh, don't say that! Domain Certification in {LLM}s},
author={Cornelius Emde and Alasdair Paren and Preetham Arvind and Maxime Guillaume Kayser and Tom Rainforth and Thomas Lukasiewicz and Philip Torr and Adel Bibi},
booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=F64wTvQBum}
}