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[ARTICLE · art-76369] src=arxiv.org ↗ pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Beyond a Global Norm: Personalizing Toxicity Sensitivity in Language Models Without Retraining

A study from arXiv (2607.23175v1) presents the first comparative evaluation of training-free methods for aligning language models to user-specific toxicity sensitivities, finding that all methods reduce alignment error by 28-47% but reveal a fundamental trade-off between alignment effectiveness, personalization, and language quality.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 28, 2026

arXiv:2607.23175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reducing toxicity is often framed as a global alignment problem, yet perceptions of harmful language are subjective and context-dependent. We present the first comparative evaluation of training-free methods for aligning language generation to user-specific toxicity sensitivities across three inference-time intervention stages: pre-decoding (prompt conditioning and rewriting), in-decoding (token, logit, and representation steering), and post-decoding (candidate re-ranking). Evaluated against toxicity sensitivity targets derived from the PRISM dataset, all methods reduce alignment error by 28-47%. However, the results reveal a fundamental trade-off between alignment effectiveness, personalization, and general language quality, showing how toxicity sensitivity alignment is an inherently multi-objective problem.

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