toxbuster
Unified Game Moderation: Soft-Prompting and LLM-Assisted Label Transfer for Resource-Efficient Toxicity Detection
Yang, Zachary, Tullo, Domenico, Rabbany, Reihaneh
Toxicity detection in gaming communities faces significant scaling challenges when expanding across multiple games and languages, particularly in real-time environments where computational efficiency is crucial. We present two key findings to address these challenges while building upon our previous work on ToxBuster, a BERT-based real-time toxicity detection system. First, we introduce a soft-prompting approach that enables a single model to effectively handle multiple games by incorporating game-context tokens, matching the performance of more complex methods like curriculum learning while offering superior scalability. Second, we develop an LLM-assisted label transfer framework using GPT-4o-mini to extend support to seven additional languages. Evaluations on real game chat data across French, German, Portuguese, and Russian achieve macro F1-scores ranging from 32.96% to 58.88%, with particularly strong performance in German, surpassing the English benchmark of 45.39%. In production, this unified approach significantly reduces computational resources and maintenance overhead compared to maintaining separate models for each game and language combination. At Ubisoft, this model successfully identifies an average of 50 players, per game, per day engaging in sanctionable behavior.
Towards Detecting Contextual Real-Time Toxicity for In-Game Chat
Yang, Zachary, Grenan-Godbout, Nicolas, Rabbany, Reihaneh
Real-time toxicity detection in online environments poses a significant challenge, due to the increasing prevalence of social media and gaming platforms. We introduce ToxBuster, a simple and scalable model that reliably detects toxic content in real-time for a line of chat by including chat history and metadata. ToxBuster consistently outperforms conventional toxicity models across popular multiplayer games, including Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor, and DOTA 2. We conduct an ablation study to assess the importance of each model component and explore ToxBuster's transferability across the datasets. Furthermore, we showcase ToxBuster's efficacy in post-game moderation, successfully flagging 82.1% of chat-reported players at a precision level of 90.0%. Additionally, we show how an additional 6% of unreported toxic players can be proactively moderated.
ToxBuster: In-game Chat Toxicity Buster with BERT
Yang, Zachary, Maricar, Yasmine, Davari, MohammadReza, Grenon-Godbout, Nicolas, Rabbany, Reihaneh
Detecting toxicity in online spaces is challenging and an ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media and gaming consumption. We introduce ToxBuster, a simple and scalable model trained on a relatively large dataset of 194k lines of game chat from Rainbow Six Siege and For Honor, carefully annotated for different kinds of toxicity. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art, ToxBuster achieves 82.95% (+7) in precision and 83.56% (+57) in recall. This improvement is obtained by leveraging past chat history and metadata. We also study the implication towards real-time and post-game moderation as well as the model transferability from one game to another.