Detoxifying Language Models with a Toxic Corpus

Abstract: Existing studies have investigated the tendency of autoregressive LLMs to generate contexts that exhibit undesired biases and toxicity. Various debiasing approaches have been proposed, which are primarily categorized into data-based and decoding-based. In our study, we investigate the ensemble of the two debiasing paradigms, proposing to use toxic corpus as an additional resource to reduce the toxicity. Our result shows that toxic corpus can indeed help to reduce the toxicity of the language generation process substantially, complementing the existing debiasing methods.