arXiv AI

Register Shifts Break LLM Safety: A Bengali Benchmark with Culturally Grounded Harms

The paper introduces BanglaSafe, a benchmark of 879 Bengali prompts that covers 17 culturally grounded harm categories and five prompting conditions. Evaluation of 18 frontier LLMs shows that 53.6% of responses are unsafe or partially unsafe, with 14.7% containing strictly harmful content. The study finds that the writing style within Bengali has a stronger impact on safety than the language switch itself, and that current safety classifiers struggle to reliably evaluate Bengali content.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attacks

IndicSafeEval is a new evaluation framework that tests the safety robustness of large language models against persuasion-based jailbreak attacks in Indian languages. The benchmark includes 7,200 adversarial prompts covering ten safety-critical content categories, six persuasive strategies, and four languages (Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi). Experiments show that model safety varies significantly across languages, prompt styles, and risk categories, revealing that current English-centric safety evaluations miss important multilingual vulnerabilities.

By Saikat Mondal, Mamta, Deeksha Varshney, Oana Cocarascu, Asif Ekbal
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attacks

IndicSafeEval is a new evaluation framework that tests the safety robustness of large language models against persuasion-based jailbreak attacks in Indian languages. The benchmark covers ten safety-critical content categories, six persuasive strategies, and four languages—Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Punjabi—producing 7,200 adversarial prompts. Experiments show that model safety varies significantly across languages, prompt styles, and risk categories, highlighting gaps in current English-centric safety assessments.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Safety Alignment Illusion: The Cross-Lingual Safety Gap in LLMs

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 AI
Aug 26

'Ghaib in Translation' aka Unseen Harm: Measuring Cross-Script Safety Inconsistency with 'Missed-in-Urdu' Scores in LLM Hate Speech Detection

The paper "Ghaib in Translation" investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle Urdu, a widely spoken language that is largely absent from safety evaluations. Five prominent LLMs—GPT‑4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen‑2.5, and Llama‑3.1—were tested on six datasets covering Nastaliq Urdu, Roman Urdu, English, and code‑switched Urdu‑English. The study found significant label instability between original‑script and English‑translation classifications, with missed‑in‑Urdu rates ranging from 2.4% to 9.9% (median 4.3%). A review of 205 papers across nine ALW/WOAH editions revealed no dedicated Urdu research, underscoring the language’s neglect in current safety research.

By Fawzia Zehra (Fuzzy), Kara-Isitt, Sonal Khosla, Stephen Swift
arXiv AI
Sep 1

IndicDetect: Evaluating Cross-Lingual LLM-Generated Text Detection for Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil

IndicDetect is a benchmark for evaluating AI‑generated text detection in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil. It pairs curated human‑written texts with LLM‑generated counterparts across multiple domains and generators, testing detectors under domain shift, generator shift, and adversarial perturbation. The study shows that supervised neural detectors fail to generalize to unseen generators and attacks, with Hindi experiencing the greatest degradation, indicating that robustness—not peak accuracy—is the main weakness in Indic language detectors.

By Bhaskar Ganesh Devalla, Junchao Wu, Nilesh Dokuparthi, Greeshma Yaluru, Tatiana Muniz Rodriguez, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong
arXiv AI
5d ago

How Narrative Wrapping Affects LLM Refusal: A Cross-Language Benchmark and Defense

The paper investigates how narrative wrapping can trick safety‑aligned language models into refusing a harmful request only when it is presented directly, but answering it when embedded in a role‑play or narrative context. It introduces GUISE, a multilingual benchmark that tests this vulnerability across English, modern Chinese, and Classical Chinese, and shows high attack success rates (up to 95.7%). The authors propose AXIS, a defense that aligns harmful‑request representations with the refusal direction and trains the model to refuse outright, achieving superior safety and usability scores on several large language models.

By Zhankai Ye, Yanning Wang, Yukai Jin, Bo Mei, Fangyi Li, Wei Wang, Shangqian Gao, Xin Liu