Yue Liu
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2026
Identity-Preserving Detoxification via Local Causal Effect Ranking on Masked Diffusion Language Models
Yucheng Lin | Yue Liu | Jiaojiao Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yucheng Lin | Yue Liu | Jiaojiao Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Text detoxification should produce safer rewrites while retaining identity mentions from the original text. However, classifier-guided methods can remove identity descriptors alongside genuinely harmful content when toxicity classifiers associate identity mentions with harmfulness and guidance relies on absolute scores. We propose CIDER (Contrastive Identity-preserving Detoxification via Explicit Reference), a default-relative, margin-gated selective-guidance method for masked diffusion language models. At each selected masked position, CIDER evaluates every candidate in the admissible top-k set relative to the model-default token in the same partially decoded state and commits a non-default candidate only when the best candidate lowers the one-step proxy score by more than a preset margin. On the primary LLaDA-8B CivilComments×Jigsaw setting, CIDER improves retention by +0.06 to +0.16 over the interpolated absolute-score frontier at matched residual-toxicity levels. At the reported aggressive endpoints, the retention advantage recurs across four data pairings on LLaDA-8B and three bases on CivilComments×Jigsaw. Controlled ablations indicate that the selection rule is an important contributor to the improvement.