{"id":1181145,"date":"2026-08-09T07:20:36","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T14:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.codeghost.online\/en-us\/research\/publication\/harm-is-not-universal-community-specific-toxicity-detection-is-urgently-needed\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T11:31:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T18:31:13","slug":"harm-is-not-universal-community-specific-toxicity-detection-is-urgently-needed","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/research.codeghost.online\/en-us\/research\/publication\/harm-is-not-universal-community-specific-toxicity-detection-is-urgently-needed\/","title":{"rendered":"Harm is not Universal: Community-Specific Toxicity Detection is Urgently Needed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">State-of-the-art toxicity detectors for text-to-image generation adopt a one-size-fits-all approach: a single universal model applying fixed safety guidelines to all users. Our empirical evidence shows that these detectors fail to shield marginalized communities: approximately 35% of generated images labeled safe are considered harmful by disability communities. In this position paper, we argue for community-specific toxicity detection (CTD). To demonstrate its feasibility, we collaborate with disability experts to develop safety guidelines for two communities: dwarfism and blind\/low vision. Using a dataset of 2,400 annotated T2I-generated images we demonstrate that both large vision-language models and existing general-purpose toxicity detectors catastrophically fail to recognize harmful content under these guidelines in zero-shot settings with F1 score lower than random guessing (F1 0.32 and 0.37). Promisingly, prompt-based adaptation methods (ICL, VQA) substantially improve harm detection performance (GPT-4o: F1 0.50 and 0.78), while parameter-efficient fine-tuning improves smaller models (0.5b-7b with best F1 0.48 and 0.59) with less than 100 demonstrations, but remains sensitive to evolving guidelines. Despite these gains, CTD performance remains far below F1 <math><mrow><mo>\u2248<\/mo><mn>0.9<\/mn><\/mrow><\/math> achieved for general-purpose toxicity detection, highlighting the challenge and the need for sustained research effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>State-of-the-art toxicity detectors for text-to-image generation adopt a one-size-fits-all approach: a single universal model applying fixed safety guidelines to all users. Our empirical evidence shows that these detectors fail to shield marginalized communities: approximately 35% of generated images labeled safe are considered harmful by disability communities. In this position paper, we argue for community-specific toxicity [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Xinnuo Xu","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Anja Thieme","user_id":"35948"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Daniela Massiceti","user_id":"40408"},{"type":"text","value":"Ioana T\u0103nase","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Rita Faia Marques","user_id":"43928"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Melanie Fernandez Pradier","user_id":"39943"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Martin Grayson","user_id":"32893"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Camilla Longden","user_id":"36311"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Cecily 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