ToxiGAN: Toxic Data Augmentation via LLM-Guided Directional Adversarial Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Peiran, Fillies, Jan, Paschke, Adrian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Peiran
Fillies, Jan
Paschke, Adrian
author_facet Li, Peiran
Fillies, Jan
Paschke, Adrian
contents Augmenting toxic language data in a controllable and class-specific manner is crucial for improving robustness in toxicity classification, yet remains challenging due to limited supervision and distributional skew. We propose ToxiGAN, a class-aware text augmentation framework that combines adversarial generation with semantic guidance from large language models (LLMs). To address common issues in GAN-based augmentation such as mode collapse and semantic drift, ToxiGAN introduces a two-step directional training strategy and leverages LLM-generated neutral texts as semantic ballast. Unlike prior work that treats LLMs as static generators, our approach dynamically selects neutral exemplars to provide balanced guidance. Toxic samples are explicitly optimized to diverge from these exemplars, reinforcing class-specific contrastive signals. Experiments on four hate speech benchmarks show that ToxiGAN achieves the strongest average performance in both macro-F1 and hate-F1, consistently outperforming traditional and LLM-based augmentation methods. Ablation and sensitivity analyses further confirm the benefits of semantic ballast and directional training in enhancing classifier robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_03121
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ToxiGAN: Toxic Data Augmentation via LLM-Guided Directional Adversarial Generation
Li, Peiran
Fillies, Jan
Paschke, Adrian
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Augmenting toxic language data in a controllable and class-specific manner is crucial for improving robustness in toxicity classification, yet remains challenging due to limited supervision and distributional skew. We propose ToxiGAN, a class-aware text augmentation framework that combines adversarial generation with semantic guidance from large language models (LLMs). To address common issues in GAN-based augmentation such as mode collapse and semantic drift, ToxiGAN introduces a two-step directional training strategy and leverages LLM-generated neutral texts as semantic ballast. Unlike prior work that treats LLMs as static generators, our approach dynamically selects neutral exemplars to provide balanced guidance. Toxic samples are explicitly optimized to diverge from these exemplars, reinforcing class-specific contrastive signals. Experiments on four hate speech benchmarks show that ToxiGAN achieves the strongest average performance in both macro-F1 and hate-F1, consistently outperforming traditional and LLM-based augmentation methods. Ablation and sensitivity analyses further confirm the benefits of semantic ballast and directional training in enhancing classifier robustness.
title ToxiGAN: Toxic Data Augmentation via LLM-Guided Directional Adversarial Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03121