Adaptive Detoxification: Safeguarding General Capabilities of LLMs through Toxicity-Aware Knowledge Editing

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission1405 Authors

Abstract:

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive language capabilities but remain vulnerable to malicious prompts and jailbreaking attacks.
Existing knowledge editing methods for LLM detoxification face two major challenges.
First, they often rely on entity-specific localization, making them ineffective against adversarial inputs without explicit entities.
Second, these methods suffer from over-editing, where detoxified models reject legitimate queries, compromising overall performance.
In this paper, we propose ToxEdit, a toxicity-aware knowledge editing approach that dynamically detects toxic activation patterns during forward propagation.
It then routes computations through adaptive inter-layer pathways to mitigate toxicity effectively.
This design ensures precise toxicity mitigation while preserving LLMs' general capabilities.
To more accurately assess over-editing, we also enhance the SafeEdit benchmark by incorporating instruction-following evaluation tasks.
Experimental results on multiple LLMs demonstrate that our ToxEdit outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both detoxification performance and safeguarding general capabilities of LLMs.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

Research Area Keywords: model bias/unfairness mitigation, model bias/fairness evaluation

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 1405