# Something Just Like TRuST : Toxicity Recognition of Span and Target

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04009/) (2017)
- [DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03023/) (2021)
- [ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09509/) (2022)
- [HateXplain: A Benchmark Dataset for Explainable Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10289/) (2020)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [A Holistic Approach to Undesired Content Detection in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03274/) (2022)
- [Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00453/) (2021)
- [Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09666/) (2019)
- [ShieldGemma: Generative AI Content Moderation Based on Gemma](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21772/) (2024)
- [ToxicChat: Unveiling Hidden Challenges of Toxicity Detection in Real-World User-AI Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17389/) (2023)
- [Latent Hatred: A Benchmark for Understanding Implicit Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05322/) (2021)
- [Unlearn What You Want to Forget: Efficient Unlearning for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20150/) (2023)
- [A New Generation of Perspective API: Efficient Multilingual Character-level Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11176/) (2022)
- [Chain of Preference Optimization: Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09136/) (2024)
- [Non-Determinism of "Deterministic" LLM Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04667/) (2024)
- [When the Majority is Wrong: Modeling Annotator Disagreement for Subjective Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06626/) (2023)
- [Designing Toxic Content Classification for a Diversity of Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04511/) (2021)
- [A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16923/) (2025)
- [On the Challenges of Using Black-Box APIs for Toxicity Evaluation in Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12397/) (2023)
- [You Only Prompt Once: On the Capabilities of Prompt Learning on Large Language Models to Tackle Toxic Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05596/) (2023)
- [COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01985/) (2023)
- [Whispering Experts: Neural Interventions for Toxicity Mitigation in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12824/) (2024)
- [Preference Tuning For Toxicity Mitigation Generalizes Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16235/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Age of Sensorial Zero Trust: Why We Can No Longer Trust Our Senses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00907/) (2025)
- [Model Unlearning Objectives Vary for Distinct Language Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26454/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Toxic language includes content that is offensive, abusive, or that promotes harm. Progress in preventing toxic output from large language models (LLMs) is hampered by inconsistent definitions of toxicity. We introduce TRuST, a large-scale dataset that unifies and expands prior resources through a carefully synthesized definition of toxicity, and corresponding annotation scheme. It consists of ~300k annotations, with high-quality human annotation on ~11k. To ensure high-quality, we designed a rigorous, multi-stage human annotation process, and evaluated the diversity of the annotators. Then we benchmarked state-of-the-art LLMs and pre-trained models on three tasks: toxicity detection, identification of the target group, and of toxic words. Our results indicate that fine-tuned PLMs outperform LLMs on the three tasks, and that current reasoning models do not reliably improve performance. TRuST constitutes one of the most comprehensive resources for evaluating and mitigating LLM toxicity, and other research in socially-aware and safer language technologies.