MIL-Decoding: Detoxifying Language Models at Token-Level via Multiple Instance Learning

Abstract

Despite advances in large pre-trained neural language models, they are prone to generating toxic language, which brings security risks to their applications. We introduce MIL-Decoding, which detoxifies language models at token-level by interpolating it with a trained multiple instance learning (MIL) network. MIL model is trained on a corpus with a toxicity label for each text to predict the overall toxicity and the toxicity of each token in its context. Intuitively, the MIL network computes a toxicity distribution over next tokens according to the generated context which supplements the original language model to avoid toxicity. We evaluate MIL-Decoding with automatic metrics and human evaluation, where MIL-Decoding outperforms other baselines in detoxification while it only hurts generation fluency a little bit.