Toxicity Detection

Adversarial perturbations can reduce state-of-the-art toxicity classifiers to near-zero accuracy, yet existing defences treat models as black boxes. We apply mechanistic interpretability to toxicity classification for the first time, identifying the internal attention-head circuits responsible for both correct classification and adversarial vulnerability. Across a 2$\times$2 factorial study (BERT $\times$ RoBERTa) $\times$ (Jigsaw $\times$ ToxiGen), extended to Llama Guard~2 (8B), we show that zeroing a single attention head recovers up to 70.4 pp of adversarial accuracy for RoBERTa on Jigsaw and 37.3 pp for Llama Guard 2 on ToxiGen, at $\leq$0.6 pp clean cost. Vulnerable heads generalise to held-out examples within $\leq$1 pp, and a class-imbalance sweep confirms they act as selective toxic-class detectors. Head suppression matches or outperforms adversarial training on Jigsaw; data augmentation dominates on ToxiGen: a dataset-specific reversal explained by whether the classifier encodes a concentrated bottleneck or a distributed circuit. Demographic analysis across 20 Jigsaw and 13 ToxiGen minority groups reveals structurally unequal adversarial vulnerability, exposing mechanistically traceable fairness gaps in current toxicity classifiers.