@inproceedings{zheng-etal-2026-stepguard,
    title = "{S}tep{G}uard: Learning Step-Level Guardrails with Scalable Supervision and Safety{--}Utility Balancing",
    author = "Zheng, Zhijie  and
      Li, Yu  and
      Qian, Chen  and
      Fu, Yuqian  and
      Fu, Yanwei  and
      Sheng, Lu  and
      Shao, Jing  and
      Liu, Dongrui",
    editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi  and
      Dev, Sunipa  and
      Li, Jessy  and
      Elliott, Desmond",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = oct,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Budapest, Hungary",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1073/",
    pages = "24644--24667",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0"
}