intentguard-finance

IntentGuard — Financial Services

Production-ready vertical intent classifier for LLM chatbot guardrails. Classifies user messages as allow, deny, or abstain to keep financial services chatbots on-topic and secure.

Research Article | perfecXion.ai | Finance Model | Healthcare Model | Legal Model

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IntentGuard Model Family

IntentGuard provides specialized intent classifiers for high-stakes verticals where chatbot misuse carries regulatory, legal, or safety risk:

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Overview

The Problem

Enterprise chatbots in regulated industries face a critical challenge: users inevitably ask off-topic questions (sports, entertainment, relationship advice) that the underlying LLM will happily answer — exposing the organization to compliance risk, brand damage, and potential liability.

Traditional keyword filters miss nuanced off-topic queries, while LLM-based guardrails are too slow and expensive for real-time inference.

The Solution

IntentGuard uses a tiny, purpose-trained DeBERTa-v3-xsmall model (22M parameters, 2.5MB quantized) to classify user intent in <30ms on CPU. The three-way classification (allow/deny/abstain) enables precise control:

• Allow — On-topic for the vertical, pass to the LLM
• Deny — Clearly off-topic, block with a polite redirect
• Abstain — Ambiguous, escalate to secondary classifier or human review

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Performance

Classification Decision Framework

User Message → Tokenize → DeBERTa Inference → Softmax
                                                  ↓
                                    ┌──────────────┼──────────────┐
                                    │              │              │
                                  ALLOW          DENY         ABSTAIN
                                (on-topic)    (off-topic)    (uncertain)
                                    │              │              │
                                Pass to LLM   Block + Redirect  Escalate

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Model Details

Core Topics (Allow)

Banking, lending, credit, payments, investing, insurance, tax, personal finance, retirement, mortgages, financial planning, budgeting

Hard Exclusions (Deny)

Sports, entertainment, cooking, gaming, celebrity gossip, fashion, travel/leisure, fiction writing, relationship advice

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Usage

Python (ONNX Runtime)

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

# Load model and tokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("perfecXion/intentguard-finance")
session = ort.InferenceSession("model.onnx")

# Classify a user message
text = "What are the current mortgage rates for a 30-year fixed loan?"
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="np", max_length=128, truncation=True, padding="max_length")

logits = session.run(None, {
    "input_ids": inputs["input_ids"],
    "attention_mask": inputs["attention_mask"]
})[0]

labels = ["allow", "deny", "abstain"]
prediction = labels[np.argmax(logits)]
confidence = float(np.max(np.exp(logits) / np.sum(np.exp(logits))))

print(f"Intent: {prediction} (confidence: {confidence:.3f})")
# Output: Intent: allow (confidence: 0.998)

Docker

# Pull and run the container
docker pull ghcr.io/perfecxion/intentguard:finance-1.0
docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/perfecxion/intentguard:finance-1.0

# Classify a message
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/classify \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What are the current mortgage rates?"}]}'

# Response: {"intent": "allow", "confidence": 0.998}

pip

pip install intentguard

# Python usage
from intentguard import IntentGuard

guard = IntentGuard.load("finance")
result = guard.classify("What are the current mortgage rates?")
print(result)  # Intent(label='allow', confidence=0.998)

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Example Classifications

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Citation

@misc{thornton2025intentguard,
  title={IntentGuard: A Production-Grade Vertical Intent Classifier for LLM Guardrails},
  author={Thornton, Scott},
  year={2025},
  publisher={perfecXion.ai},
  url={https://perfecxion.ai/articles/intentguard-vertical-intent-classifier-llm-guardrails.html},
  note={Model: https://huggingface.co/perfecXion/intentguard-finance}
}

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Quality Metrics

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License

Apache 2.0

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Links

• Research Article: IntentGuard: A Production-Grade Vertical Intent Classifier for LLM Guardrails
• Publisher: perfecXion.ai
• Healthcare Model: perfecXion/intentguard-healthcare
• Legal Model: perfecXion/intentguard-legal
• Docker Image: ghcr.io/perfecxion/intentguard:finance-1.0