CausalDetox: Causal Head Selection and Intervention for Language Model Detoxification

TL;DR

CausalDetox is a framework that identifies and intervenes on specific attention heads in language models to reduce toxic outputs effectively and efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a causal head selection method using PNS, along with input-specific and fine-tuning strategies for detoxification, plus a new benchmark for evaluation.

Findings

Achieves up to 5.34% greater toxicity reduction than baselines.

Provides a 7x speedup in head selection process.

Maintains linguistic fluency while reducing toxicity.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate toxic content, posing significant risks for safe deployment. Current mitigation strategies often degrade generation quality or require costly human annotation. We propose CAUSALDETOX, a framework that identifies and intervenes on the specific attention heads causally responsible for toxic generation. Using the Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS), we isolate a minimal set of heads that are necessary and sufficient for toxicity. We utilize these components via two complementary strategies: (1) Local Inference-Time Intervention, which constructs dynamic, input-specific steering vectors for context-aware detoxification, and (2) PNS-Guided Fine-Tuning, which permanently unlearns toxic representations. We also introduce PARATOX, a novel benchmark of aligned toxic/non-toxic sentence pairs enabling controlled counterfactual evaluation. Experiments on ToxiGen, ImplicitHate, and ParaDetox show that CAUSALDETOX achieves up to 5.34% greater toxicity reduction compared to baselines while preserving linguistic fluency, and offers a 7x speedup in head selection.