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Related papers: Where Does Toxicity Live? Mechanistic Localization…

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Safety fine-tuning algorithms reduce harmful outputs in language models, yet their mechanisms remain under-explored. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular choice of algorithm, but prior explanations, attributing its effects…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yushi Yang , Filip Sondej , Harry Mayne , Andrew Lee , Adam Mahdi

In the pursuit of developing Large Language Models (LLMs) that adhere to societal standards, it is imperative to detect the toxicity in the generated text. The majority of existing toxicity metrics rely on encoder models trained on specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Hyukhun Koh , Dohyung Kim , Minwoo Lee , Kyomin Jung

Disclaimer: Samples in this paper may be harmful and cause discomfort. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable multimodal generation but inherit toxic, biased, and NSFW signals from weakly curated pretraining corpora, causing safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Hongbo Wang , MaungMaung AprilPyone , Isao Echizen

Toxicity is a prevalent social behavior that involves the use of hate speech, offensive language, bullying, and abusive speech. While text-based approaches for toxicity detection are common, there is limited research on processing speech…

Sound · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Ahlam Husni Abu Nada , Siddique Latif , Junaid Qadir

Pretrained large language models have become indispensable for solving various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, safely deploying them in real world applications is challenging because they generate toxic content. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Shrimai Prabhumoye , Mostofa Patwary , Mohammad Shoeybi , Bryan Catanzaro

WARNING: This paper contains examples of offensive materials. To address the proliferation of toxic content on social media, we introduce SMARTER, we introduce SMARTER, a data-efficient two-stage framework for explainable content moderation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Huy Nghiem , Advik Sachdeva , Hal Daumé

Multilingual toxicity detection remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of training data and resources for many languages. While prior work has leveraged the translate-test paradigm to support cross-lingual transfer across a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Samuel J. Bell , Eduardo Sánchez , David Dale , Pontus Stenetorp , Mikel Artetxe , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to various real-world applications, leveraging massive, web-sourced datasets like Common Crawl, C4, and FineWeb for pretraining. While these datasets provide linguistic data essential for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Sai Krishna Mendu , Harish Yenala , Aditi Gulati , Shanu Kumar , Parag Agrawal

Text detoxification aims to minimize the risk of language models producing toxic content. Existing detoxification methods of directly constraining the model output or further training the model on the non-toxic corpus fail to achieve a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Zecheng Tang , Keyan Zhou , Juntao Li , Yuyang Ding , Pinzheng Wang , Bowen Yan , Rejie Hua , Min Zhang

We present two novel unsupervised methods for eliminating toxicity in text. Our first method combines two recent ideas: (1) guidance of the generation process with small style-conditional language models and (2) use of paraphrasing models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-04 David Dale , Anton Voronov , Daryna Dementieva , Varvara Logacheva , Olga Kozlova , Nikita Semenov , Alexander Panchenko

The volume of machine-generated content online has grown dramatically due to the widespread use of Large Language Models (LLMs), leading to new challenges for content moderation systems. Conventional content moderation classifiers, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Shaz Furniturewala , Arkaitz Zubiaga

Language models (LMs) must be both safe and equitable to be responsibly deployed in practice. With safety in mind, numerous detoxification techniques (e.g., Dathathri et al. 2020; Krause et al. 2020) have been proposed to mitigate toxic LM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Albert Xu , Eshaan Pathak , Eric Wallace , Suchin Gururangan , Maarten Sap , Dan Klein

Recent generative large language models (LLMs) show remarkable performance in non-English languages, but when prompted in those languages they tend to express higher harmful social biases and toxicity levels. Prior work has shown that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Vera Neplenbroek , Arianna Bisazza , Raquel Fernández

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to their extensive global deployment, and ensuring their safety calls for comprehensive and multilingual toxicity evaluations. However, existing toxicity benchmarks are overwhelmingly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Devansh Jain , Priyanshu Kumar , Samuel Gehman , Xuhui Zhou , Thomas Hartvigsen , Maarten Sap

Reducing the likelihood of generating harmful and toxic output is an essential task when aligning large language models (LLMs). Existing methods mainly rely on training an external reward model (i.e., another language model) or fine-tuning…

While alignment algorithms are now commonly used to tune pre-trained language models towards a user's preferences, we lack explanations for the underlying mechanisms in which models become ``aligned'', thus making it difficult to explain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-05 Andrew Lee , Xiaoyan Bai , Itamar Pres , Martin Wattenberg , Jonathan K. Kummerfeld , Rada Mihalcea

Toxic language is one of the major barrier to safe online participation, yet robust mitigation tools are scarce for African languages. This study addresses this critical gap by investigating automatic text detoxification (toxic to neutral…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Abayomi O. Agbeyangi

Large Language Models (LLMs) drive current AI breakthroughs despite very little being known about their internal representations. In this work, we propose to shed the light on LLMs inner mechanisms through the lens of geometry. In…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Randall Balestriero , Romain Cosentino , Sarath Shekkizhar

Warning: this paper includes model outputs showing offensive content. Recent large-scale Visual-Language Generative Models (VLGMs) have achieved unprecedented improvement in multimodal image/text generation. However, these models might also…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Xinpeng Wang , Xiaoyuan Yi , Han Jiang , Shanlin Zhou , Zhihua Wei , Xing Xie

Pretraining datasets are foundational to the development of multimodal models, yet they often have inherent biases and toxic content from the web-scale corpora they are sourced from. In this paper, we investigate the prevalence of toxicity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Karthik Reddy Kanjula , Surya Guthikonda , Nahid Alam , Shayekh Bin Islam