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M. Coroi

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Steering LLM Toxicity Along User-Specified Directions

Bachelor thesis (2026) - M. Coroi, J. Yang, A. Arzberger, E. Liscio, C.E. Brandt
Toxic content is not universally defined: what one user finds offensive, another may find acceptable depending on cultural background, context, and purpose. Current LLM safety systems apply a single global toxicity threshold to every user, and adapting this behaviour after deployment is expensive. This paper asks whether a frozen LLM can instead be steered at inference time to follow individual users’ toxicity preferences across six toxicity dimensions, without retraining. A classifier-guided decoding framework driven by a per-user sensitivity vector is instantiated as three deployable strategies and evaluated on the PRISM preference dataset. All three strategies reduce per-user toxicity error by 15–21%, while preserving general-knowledge accuracy to within 0.7 pp of the unguided baseline. The central finding is directional steerability: the decoder responds to the shape of a user’s preference vector, producing category-specific reductions that align with per-user weights (median cosine similarity 0.845, p = 0.0097 above a permutation baseline). These results show that meaningful personalised toxicity control is achievable at deployment time, without retraining the model. ...