Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is largely developed in English, assuming these safeguards generalize across multilingual settings. However, this assumption remains underexplored and exposes a vulnerability in low-resource languages.
The paper introduces MMSAFE, a multi-layer framework designed to identify safety-degrading data in multilingual large language models. It shows that safety signals are distributed across multiple layers and only partially shared across languages, unlike the single-layer assumption used in monolingual settings. Experiments demonstrate that MMSAFE reduces harmful-response rates by 60% compared to random filtering and outperforms the best single-layer baseline across various models, languages, and safety benchmarks.
By Jiakun Li, Guowei Song, Sijia Li, Xingwei He, Hongzheng Chai, Yuan Yuan
arXiv:2606. 08451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models often exhibit sycophancy, which is the tendency to affirm users' opinions regardless of factual accuracy.
By Arya Shah, Himanshu Beniwal, Mayank Singh, Chaklam Silpasuwanchai
arXiv:2606. 28843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning a large language model is a ubiquitous method for enhancing its capability on a specific downstream task.
By Will Hawkins, Kaivalya Rawal, Jonathan Rystr{\o}m, Stratis Tsirtsis, Zihao Fu, Greta Warren, Ryan Brown, Eoin Delaney, Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, Chris Russell
arXiv:2608.22490v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Safety alignment helps models adhere to human values, but it often reduces response utility. We ask a critical but understudied question: Does safety a...
By Chanwoong Yoon, Jungsoo Park, Alan Ritter
arXiv:2607. 10112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models remains brittle across languages: prompts reliably refused in English can elicit harmful compliance in non-English and low-resource settings.
By Chigozirim Ifebi, Brent Kong, Ayushi Mehrotra
arXiv:2608. 13695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model providers routinely cite multilingual safety benchmarks spanning a dozen or more languages as evidence that their models are safe for non-English-speaking users.
By Chialuka Prisca-Mary Onuoha, Bright Etornam Sunu, Rashidat Sikiru
arXiv:2608.29936v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) degrades across languages, yet the internal mechanism driving this asymmetry remains poorly understo...
By Apoorva Upadhyaya, Sandipan Sikdar
arXiv:2605. 17173v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models exhibit safety degradation in non-English languages.
By Max Zhang, Ameen Patel, Sang T. Truong, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv:2603.04410v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: While different stakeholders are trying to leverage Arabic Language Models (ALMs), safety alignment in ALMs remains largely underexplored, hi...
By Omar Abdelnasser, Fatemah Alharbi, Khaled Khasawneh, Ihsen Alouani, Mohammed E. Fouda
The paper titled "Safety Alignment Illusion: The Cross-Lingual Safety Gap in LLMs" highlights that current safety alignment training for large language models is predominantly English-centric, leading to failures in non‑English languages. It introduces INCLUDE, a multilingual benchmark with 2,604 prompts in six languages (English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Hinglish) to measure Indian‑centric socio‑cultural biases. Evaluation of ten open‑ and closed‑source LLMs shows that Bengali models exhibit the highest bias scores among open‑source models, while English shows the lowest bias in open‑source but the highest in closed‑source models.
By Namya Bhatnagar
arXiv:2606. 15396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns.
By Wenbo Yu, Bohua Wang, Hao Fang, Kuofeng Gao, Jingru Zeng, Xiaochen Yang, Tianyi Zhang, Xiaoxiao Ma, Jiawei Kong, Hao Wu, Bin Chen, Shu-Tao Xia, Min Zhang