Adversarial Evaluation of Large Language Models for Building Robust Offensive Language Detection in Moroccan Arabic

Abstract

Offensive language detection is crucial for ensuring safe and inclusive digital environments. Identifying harmful content protects users and supports healthier online interactions. Despite advances in transformer-based models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), their application to this task remains underexplored for low-resource languages such as Moroccan Arabic, especially compared with high-resource languages. This study evaluates the performance of various open- and closed-source LLMs for offensive language detection in Moroccan Darija. The evaluated models include general-purpose LLMs such as LLaMA, Mistral, and Gemma, as well as Arabic-focused models such as ArabianGPT, Falcon Arabic, and Atlas-Chat. We also experiment with reasoning models such as DeepSeek and GPT-4. Beyond traditional evaluation metrics, we investigate the robustness of these LLMs and examine the impact of adversarial training on their performance. Moreover, we contribute to the field by creating a large, high-quality dataset. Our evaluation revealed that GPT-4o Mini achieved the best overall performance, reaching an F1-score of 88%. However, robustness testing under black-box and white-box adversarial attacks exposed notable vulnerabilities, with attack success rates reaching 30%, thereby highlighting the need for enhancement. Despite the complex morphology and linguistic variability of Moroccan Darija, adversarial training resulted in a notable improvement in both overall model performance and robustness against adversarial attacks, yielding an average increase of 20.89% in resistance to attacks. Furthermore, this approach enabled GPT-4o Mini to achieve an F1-score of 91%, surpassing the current state-of-the-art performance by 6%. These results highlight the importance of incorporating adversarial approaches in low-resource dialectal settings to effectively address linguistic variability and data scarcity.