English

GTA: Gated Toxicity Avoidance for LM Performance Preservation

Computation and Language 2023-12-12 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Caution: This paper includes offensive words that could potentially cause unpleasantness. The fast-paced evolution of generative language models such as GPT-4 has demonstrated outstanding results in various NLP generation tasks. However, due to the potential generation of offensive words related to race or gender, various Controllable Text Generation (CTG) methods have been proposed to mitigate the occurrence of harmful words. However, existing CTG methods not only reduce toxicity but also negatively impact several aspects of the language model's generation performance, including topic consistency, grammar, and perplexity. This paper explores the limitations of previous methods and introduces a novel solution in the form of a simple Gated Toxicity Avoidance (GTA) that can be applied to any CTG method. We also evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed GTA by comparing it with state-of-the-art CTG methods across various datasets. Our findings reveal that gated toxicity avoidance efficiently achieves comparable levels of toxicity reduction to the original CTG methods while preserving the generation performance of the language model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.06122,
  title  = {GTA: Gated Toxicity Avoidance for LM Performance Preservation},
  author = {Heegyu Kim and Hyunsouk Cho},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.06122},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:46:42.075Z