Language Detoxification with Attribute-Discriminative Latent Space
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Abstract (arXiv)
Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive results on natural language understanding tasks, but they can also generate toxic text such as insults, threats, and profanity, limiting their real-world applications. To overcome this issue, a few text generation approaches aim to detoxify toxic texts using additional LMs or perturbations. However, previous methods require excessive memory, computations, and time which are serious bottlenecks in their real-world application. To address such limitations, we propose an effective yet efficient method for language detoxification using an attribute-discriminative latent space. Specifically, we project the latent space of an original Transformer LM onto a discriminative latent space that well-separates texts by their attributes using a projection block and an attribute discriminator. This allows the LM to control the text generation to be non-toxic with minimal memory and computation overhead. We validate our model, Attribute-Discriminative Language Model (ADLM) on detoxified language and dialogue generation tasks, on which our method significantly outperforms baselines both in performance and efficiency.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 40 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2022.
Builds on
40 of 61 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 5; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
11 papers.
- 2023Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversalcited by 45
- 2024Walking in Others' Shoes: How Perspective-Taking Guides Large Language Models in Reducing Toxicity and Biascited by 17
- 2024Negating Negatives: Alignment with Human Negative Samples via Distributional Dispreference Optimizationcited by 11
- 2024DESTEIN: Navigating Detoxification of Language Models via Universal Steering Pairs and Head-wise Activation Fusioncited by 9
- 2025UniDetox: Universal Detoxification of Large Language Models via Dataset Distillationcited by 8
- 2023Learn What NOT to Learn: Towards Generative Safety in Chatbotscited by 7
- 2024Large Language Models can be Strong Self-Detoxifierscited by 7
- 2025IF-GUIDE: Influence Function-Guided Detoxification of LLMscited by 7
- 2025Language Surgery in Multilingual Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2026Test-Time Detoxification without Training or Learning Anythingcited by 2
- 2024Fine-Grained Detoxification via Instance-Level Prefixes for Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Test-Time Detoxification without Training or Learning Anything14 Jan 2026
- 2025Language Surgery in Multilingual Large Language Models14 Jun 2025
- 2025IF-GUIDE: Influence Function-Guided Detoxification of LLMs2 Jun 2025
- 2025UniDetox: Universal Detoxification of Large Language Models via Dataset Distillation29 Apr 2025
- 2024Large Language Models can be Strong Self-Detoxifiers4 Oct 2024
- 2024Walking in Others' Shoes: How Perspective-Taking Guides Large Language Models in Reducing Toxicity and Bias22 Jul 2024
- 2024DESTEIN: Navigating Detoxification of Language Models via Universal Steering Pairs and Head-wise Activation Fusion16 Apr 2024
- 2024Negating Negatives: Alignment with Human Negative Samples via Distributional Dispreference Optimization6 Mar 2024
- 2024Fine-Grained Detoxification via Instance-Level Prefixes for Large Language Models23 Feb 2024
- 2023Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal14 Oct 2023
- 2023Learn What NOT to Learn: Towards Generative Safety in Chatbots21 Apr 2023