TrustJev: Separating Policy Authority from Untrusted Evidence in LLM-Based Decisions

Overview & Synopsis

Decision models enable software to select from predefined actions using natural language inputs. However, the external evidence that supplies facts for these decisions may also contain instructions that attempt to override the application's policy. We propose TrustJev, a framework combining protected policy scoring with bounded evidence corrections. A single Transformer backbone computes policy scores and a correction budget from trusted policy and candidates, then bounds evidence corrections by that budget. Paired supervision encourages stable predictions under instruction insertions that preserve task facts and changed preferences when edits change the correct answer. Authority supervision accommodates evidence when the policy alone cannot determine the decision. We evaluate a 0.6B implementation against 14 baselines on three datasets covering authentication, instruction hierarchy, and executable authorization rules. TrustJev achieves the highest mean Balance, the harmonic mean of accuracy on non-attack and attack inputs, exceeding the strongest baseline on each by 0.57-1.05 percentage points. In the authorization benchmark, it correctly answers all 32 attacks per source in a fixed pool for 95.77% of sources, compared with 80.98% for the strongest comparator. TrustJev maintains comparable inference memory and median latency, with additional overhead primarily during training.