Beyond a Global Norm: Personalizing Toxicity Sensitivity in Language Models Without Retraining
Rares A. C. Diaconescu, Iulia Slanina, Alina Florea, Andrei B. Trache, Miruna E. Coroi, Anne Arzberger, Jie Yang, Enrico Liscio
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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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.