Where Does Toxicity Live? Mechanistic Localization and Targeted Suppression in Language Models
About
Large language models frequently generate toxic, hateful, or harmful content, yet existing mitigation methods rely on costly retraining or output-level filtering with no mechanistic insight into where toxicity originates internally. We introduce Meow2X and TRNE, two complementary retraining-free frameworks that localize toxicity to specific layers and neurons by analyzing activation differentials between toxic and neutral prompts, then suppress them via inference-time scaling or minimal rank-one weight edits -- without any gradient descent. Evaluations across five LMs, two benchmarks, and 90 configurations using dual safety evaluators demonstrate consistent toxicity reduction while preserving language modeling quality. Our analysis reveals that toxicity is disproportionately encoded in early MLP layers, varies across architectures, and is systematically underestimated by single-evaluator setups -- underscoring the need for multi-evaluator safety assessment. By bridging mechanistic interpretability with practical detoxification, our framework offers a principled path toward safer, more transparent language models.