# Characterising Toxicity in Generative Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06700 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06700/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 7 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [A New Generation of Perspective API: Efficient Multilingual Character-level Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11176/) (2022)
- [Facilitating Fine-grained Detection of Chinese Toxic Language: Hierarchical Taxonomy, Resources, and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04446/) (2023)
- [Toxic Bias: Perspective API Misreads German as More Toxic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12651/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, the advent of the attention mechanism has significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), revolutionizing text processing and text generation. This has come about through transformer-based decoder-only architectures, which have become ubiquitous in NLP due to their impressive text processing and generation capabilities. Despite these breakthroughs, language models (LMs) remain susceptible to generating undesired outputs: inappropriate, offensive, or otherwise harmful responses. We will collectively refer to these as ``toxic'' outputs. Although methods like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have been developed to align model outputs with human values, these safeguards can often be circumvented through carefully crafted prompts. Therefore, this paper examines the extent to which LLMs generate toxic content when prompted, as well as the linguistic factors -- both lexical and syntactic -- that influence the production of such outputs in generative models.