On the Robustness of Knowledge Editing for Detoxification
This work addresses the reliability of detoxification methods for AI safety, highlighting incremental insights into failure modes and limitations.
The paper tackled the problem of evaluating knowledge-editing-based detoxification in large language models, finding that it is only robust for certain models, limited objectives, and specific languages, with effectiveness degrading when multiple unsafe behaviors are edited jointly.
Knowledge-Editing-based (KE-based) detoxification has emerged as a promising approach for mitigating harmful behaviours in Large Language Models. Existing evaluations, however, largely rely on automatic toxicity classifiers, implicitly assuming that reduced toxicity scores reflect genuine behavioural suppression. In this work, we propose a robustness-oriented evaluation framework for KE-based detoxification that examines its reliability beyond standard classifier-based metrics along three dimensions: optimisation robustness, compositional robustness, and cross-lingual robustness. We identify pseudo-detoxification as a common failure mode, where apparent toxicity reductions arise from degenerate generation behaviours rather than meaningful suppression of unsafe content. We further show that detoxification effectiveness degrades when multiple unsafe behaviours are edited jointly, and that both monolingual and cross-lingual detoxification remain effective only under specific model-method combinations. Overall, our results indicate that KE-based detoxification is robust only for certain models, limited numbers of detoxification objectives, and a subset of languages.