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Related papers: Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification …

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Large language models (LLMs) trained on webscale data can produce toxic outputs, raising concerns for safe deployment. Prior defenses, based on applications of DPO, NPO, and similar algorithms, reduce the likelihood of harmful…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks, yet they remain vulnerable to generating toxic content, necessitating detoxification strategies to ensure safe and responsible deployment. Test-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yisong Xiao , Aishan Liu , Siyuan Liang , Zonghao Ying , Xianglong Liu , Dacheng Tao

Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive fluency across diverse tasks, yet their tendency to produce toxic content remains a critical challenge for AI safety and public trust. Existing toxicity mitigation approaches primarily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zuhair Hasan Shaik , Abdullah Mazhar , Aseem Srivastava , Md Shad Akhtar

While large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been applied to hate speech detoxification, the prompts often trigger safety alerts, causing LLMs to refuse the task. In this study, we systematically investigate false refusal behavior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Kyuri Im , Shuzhou Yuan , Michael Färber

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful text generators, yet they can produce toxic or harmful content even when given seemingly harmless prompts. This presents a serious safety challenge and can cause real-world harm. Toxicity is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Himanshu Singh , Ziwei Xu , A. V. Subramanyam , Mohan Kankanhalli

Warning: this paper contains model outputs exhibiting offensiveness and biases. Recently pre-trained language models (PLMs) have prospered in various natural language generation (NLG) tasks due to their ability to generate fairly fluent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Zonghan Yang , Xiaoyuan Yi , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Xing Xie

We propose a constraint learning schema for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with attribute control. Given a training corpus and control criteria formulated as a sequence-level constraint on model outputs, our method fine-tunes the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Tao Meng , Ninareh Mehrabi , Palash Goyal , Anil Ramakrishna , Aram Galstyan , Richard Zemel , Kai-Wei Chang , Rahul Gupta , Charith Peris

The increasing use of large language models (LLMs) trained by third parties raises significant security concerns. In particular, malicious actors can introduce backdoors through poisoning attacks to generate undesirable outputs. While such…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Shuli Jiang , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Yi Zhou , Farhan Ahmed , Ling Cai , Nathalie Baracaldo

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to Software Engineering (SE), increasingly used in development workflows. However, their widespread adoption raises concerns about the presence and propagation of toxic language - harmful or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hao Zhuo , Yicheng Yang , Kewen Peng

Prior works on detoxification are scattered in the sense that they do not cover all aspects of detoxification needed in a real-world scenario. Notably, prior works restrict the task of developing detoxification models to only a seen subset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker , Muhammad Abdul-Mageed , Laks V. S. Lakshmanan

How to defend large language models (LLMs) from generating toxic content is an important research area. Yet, most research focused on various model training techniques to remediate LLMs by updating their weights. A typical related research…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Hongyuan Lu , Wai Lam

Multimodal Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to their autoregressive counterparts. Yet their vulnerability to backdoor attacks remains largely unexplored. In this work, we show that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Guangnian Wan , Qi Li , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Xinchao Wang

Recent pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieved great success on many natural language processing tasks through learning linguistic features and contextualized sentence representation. Since attributes captured in stacked layers of PLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Dongsuk Oh , Yejin Kim , Hodong Lee , H. Howie Huang , Heuiseok Lim

We introduce aligned probing, a novel interpretability framework that aligns the behavior of language models (LMs), based on their outputs, and their internal representations (internals). Using this framework, we examine over 20 OLMo,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Andreas Waldis , Vagrant Gautam , Anne Lauscher , Dietrich Klakow , Iryna Gurevych

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance but pose inherent risks of generating toxic content, restricting their safe deployment. While traditional methods (e.g., alignment) adjust output preferences, they fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zenghao Duan , Zhiyi Yin , Zhichao Shi , Liang Pang , Shaoling Jing , Zihe Huang , Jiayi Wu , Yu Yan , Jingcheng Deng , Huawei Shen , Xueqi Cheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire deceptive behaviors through backdoor attacks, where the model executes prohibited actions whenever secret triggers appear in the input. Existing safety training methods largely fail to address this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Guangyu Shen , Siyuan Cheng , Xiangzhe Xu , Yuan Zhou , Hanxi Guo , Zhuo Zhang , Xiangyu Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) aligned for safety often suffer from over-refusal, the tendency to reject seemingly toxic or benign prompts by misclassifying them as toxic. This behavior undermines models' helpfulness and restricts usability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yuxiao Lu , Lin Xu , Yang Sun , Wenjun Li , Jie Shi

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) may be poisonous with backdoors or bias injected by the suspicious attacker during the fine-tuning process. A core challenge of purifying potentially poisonous PLMs is precisely finding poisonous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Zhiyuan Zhang , Deli Chen , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are excellent at generating synthetic data. However, their performance in sensitive domains such as text detoxification has not received proper attention from the scientific community. This paper explores…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Sergey Pletenev , Daniil Moskovskiy , Alexander Panchenko

Adversarial purification is a defense mechanism for safeguarding classifiers against adversarial attacks without knowing the type of attacks or training of the classifier. These techniques characterize and eliminate adversarial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Raha Moraffah , Shubh Khandelwal , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Huan Liu