bdc-domain-guardrail-modernbert

BDC Domain Guardrail - ModernBERT

Binary classifier for automotive service domain relevance. Determines if user messages are relevant to BDC (Business Development Center) conversations.

Labels

• BLOCK (0): Message is off-topic, not related to automotive service
• ALLOW (1): Message is relevant to automotive service, scheduling, or conversational

Training Details

• Base Model: answerdotai/ModernBERT-base
• Method: LoRA fine-tuning (r=32, alpha=64) with guardrail-optimized loss
• Training Data: ~14,600 samples with confidence-weighted soft labels
• Optimization: Asymmetric penalty for false blocks (1.5x weight)
• Class Weights: None (natural distribution)

Performance (Threshold: 0.35)

Recommended threshold: 0.35 (optimized for minimal false blocks while maintaining high ALLOW recall)

Usage

ONNX (Recommended for Production)

import onnxruntime as ort
import numpy as np
from transformers import AutoTokenizer
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

# Download unquantized ONNX model
onnx_path = hf_hub_download("karanchugh/bdc-domain-guardrail-modernbert", "onnx/model.onnx")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("karanchugh/bdc-domain-guardrail-modernbert")

# Create session
session = ort.InferenceSession(onnx_path, providers=['CPUExecutionProvider'])

# Inference with optimal threshold
text = "Can I schedule an oil change?"
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="np", truncation=True, max_length=256, padding="max_length")
outputs = session.run(None, {
    "input_ids": inputs["input_ids"].astype(np.int64),
    "attention_mask": inputs["attention_mask"].astype(np.int64),
})

logits = outputs[0][0]
probs = np.exp(logits) / np.exp(logits).sum()
allow_prob = probs[1]

# Use threshold=0.35 for optimal guardrail performance
prediction = "ALLOW" if allow_prob > 0.35 else "BLOCK"
print(f"{prediction}: {allow_prob:.3f}")

PyTorch

from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("karanchugh/bdc-domain-guardrail-modernbert")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("karanchugh/bdc-domain-guardrail-modernbert")

text = "Can I schedule an oil change?"
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True, max_length=256)

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)
    probs = torch.softmax(outputs.logits, dim=-1)
    allow_prob = probs[0][1].item()
    
# Use threshold=0.35 for optimal guardrail performance
prediction = "ALLOW" if allow_prob > 0.35 else "BLOCK"
print(f"{prediction}: {allow_prob:.3f}")

Files

• model.safetensors: Full merged PyTorch model
• onnx/model.onnx: Unquantized ONNX model (571 MB) - recommended for production
• tokenizer.json: Fast tokenizer

Important: Decision Threshold

Do NOT use default threshold of 0.5!

The model is optimized for threshold=0.35 which provides:

• 98.6% ALLOW recall (catches 98.6% of valid customer messages)
• Only 1.4% false blocks (minimal impact on customer experience)
• 89.1% ALLOW precision (acceptable false allow rate)

Using threshold=0.5 will result in 7.7% false blocks (108 blocked valid messages).

Deployment Configuration

GUARDRAIL_USE_DOMAIN_MODEL=true
GUARDRAIL_RELEVANCE_THRESHOLD=0.35  # Critical: use 0.35, not 0.5!

Model Size & Latency

• Model size: 571 MB (unquantized for best accuracy)
• CPU inference: ~100-130ms per sample
• Recommended: Use batching for better throughput

Note: Quantized version (254 MB) showed 6% accuracy degradation and is not recommended.

Training Improvements

This model was trained with:

• ✅ No inverse frequency weighting (prevents over-blocking)
• ✅ Asymmetric loss penalty (1.5x weight on false blocks)
• ✅ Threshold optimization (0.35 vs default 0.5)

Result: 81% reduction in false blocks compared to baseline (from 7.7% to 1.4%).