Guard models are widely used to detect harmful content in user prompts and LLM responses. However, state-of-the-art guard models rely solely on terminal-layer representations and overlook the rich safety-relevant features distributed across internal layers. We present SIREN, a lightweight guard model that harnesses these internal features. By identifying safety neurons via linear probing and combining them through an adaptive layer-weighted strategy, SIREN builds a harmfulness detector from LLM internals without modifying the underlying model. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that SIREN substantially outperforms state-of-the-art open-source guard models across multiple benchmarks while using 250 times fewer trainable parameters. Moreover, SIREN exhibits superior generalization to unseen benchmarks, naturally enables real-time streaming detection, and significantly improves inference efficiency compared to generative guard models. Overall, our results highlight LLM internal states as a promising foundation for practical, high-performance harmfulness detection.
@article{arxiv.2604.18519,
title = {LLM Safety From Within: Detecting Harmful Content with Internal Representations},
author = {Difan Jiao and Yilun Liu and Ye Yuan and Zhenwei Tang and Linfeng Du and Haolun Wu and Ashton Anderson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.18519},
year = {2026}
}