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jev-guardbench

Benchmark testing whether Jev or open Kev can replace an LLM judge in agent guardrail callbacks on 7,925 public examples.

Projectresearch

Overview

jev-guardbench tests whether a System One model can replace the second LLM judge many agents use to check messages before and after the main model answers. It gave Jev (and variants including a decomposed version and open-source Kev) and LLM judges (Gemini 3.6 Flash, Claude Haiku 4.5) the same policy text and 7,925 rows from public datasets across four checks: PII, prompt injection, harmful requests and harmful responses.

The README reports Jev at about 250 ms median per check versus 672 to 1,189 ms for the judges, $0.02 to 0.03 per 1,000 checks versus $0.21 to 0.71, matching the best judge on PII (F1 0.93) and prompt injection (0.61) but trailing on harmful content, so it missed the strict bar set in advance. Thresholds were tuned on one split and scored on another, hypotheses were pre-registered, guards also ran inside a google-adk agent to measure added latency, and stress tests covered attacks, repeats, long inputs and eight languages.

What the decision model decides

TypeQuestionAnswers
Yes / noDoes this message contain PII?—
Yes / noIs this a prompt injection?—
Yes / noIs this request or response harmful under the policy?—

How it works

  1. Give every guard the same policy text and datasets
  2. Tune thresholds on one split and score on another
  3. Measure F1, latency and cost; run inside a real agent
  4. Compare against pre-registered hypotheses

Strengths

  • Pre-registered success criteria
  • Fair split and real-agent latency
  • Includes an open model (Kev)

Caveats

  • Jev missed the pre-set accuracy bar on harmful content
  • Public datasets may differ from production traffic

Getting started

See RESULTS.md and HYPOTHESES.md in the repository.

At a glance

Type
Project
Status
research
Language
Python
Runtime
Benchmark harness with google-adk
Has code
yes
Stars
2

Use cases and integrations

How curated lists describe it

  • Can a System One model (TypeSafe Jev, open-source Kev) replace an LLM-as-judge in agent guardrail callbacks?

    wh000wh000/awesome-jev-live
  • Can a System One model (TypeSafe Jev, open-source Kev) replace an LLM-as-judge in agent guardrail callbacks?

    hellogumbo/awesome-jev

Frequently asked questions

Can Jev replace an LLM judge?

It matched the best judge on PII and injection but trailed on harmful content in this test.

How much faster and cheaper?

About 3 times faster and 10 to 25 times cheaper, per the README.

Was the test fair?

Criteria were pre-registered and thresholds tuned on a separate split.

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