arXiv Computation and Language

Harm Is Behavioural, Moderation Is Lexical: How Language and Culture Decide Whom Automated Safety Systems Protect and Whom They Silence

The paper examines how automated safety systems unevenly flag harmful content, disproportionately labeling African American English as offensive and misclassifying content from drag queens and white nationalists. It identifies seven failure modes rooted in vocabulary-based harm detection and proposes an evaluation protocol that highlights gaps in performance across languages. Applied to five open systems in eleven languages, the study finds that none achieve native-speaker accuracy, and higher capability often increases discrimination, widening the disparity between best- and worst-served language communities.

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
Oct 16

In the Guise of Correction: How Framing and Cultural Adaptation Erode LLM Safety on Real-World Criminal Cases

The paper introduces GUISE, a benchmark of criminal‑assistance scenarios drawn from real‑world cases and organized using the UNODC International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes. It evaluates large language models under three linguistic framings and across five cultures, finding that framing and cultural adaptation significantly increase unsafe compliance rates. The study also shows that unsafe responses from the least‑safe models exhibit strong Anglocentric language, with leakage growing alongside harmfulness.

By Mohsinul Kabir, Md. Tariquzzaman, Karam S. R. Elradie, Polydoros Giannouris, Yuechen Jiang, Shaoxiong Ji, Sophia Ananiadou
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Used, Mentioned, or Condemned? A Controlled Contrast-Set Diagnostic for the Use-Mention Distinction in Code-Mixed Hinglish Misogyny Detection

The paper introduces a diagnostic tool for distinguishing the use of misogynistic slurs from their mention in counter‑speech within code‑mixed Hinglish. It identifies evaluation artifacts in existing corpora, releases a 416‑item minimal‑pair contrast set that decorrelates slur presence and gendered register from labels, and proposes a pair‑consistency metric to assess model performance. Experiments show that even strong baselines struggle to consistently label counter‑speech pairs, while a large language model achieves perfect scores, indicating the benchmark measures genuine capability rather than exploitation of artifacts.

By Ashanvi Yadav, Shubham Bhardwaj
arXiv AI
Oct 15

XL-SafetyBench: A Country-Grounded Cross-Cultural Benchmark for LLM Safety and Cultural Sensitivity

arXiv:2605.05662v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current LLM safety benchmarks are predominantly English-centric and often rely on translation, failing to capture country-specific harms. Mor...

By Dasol Choi, Eugenia Kim, Jaewon Noh, Sang Seo, Eunmi Kim, Myunggyo Oh, Yunjin Park, Brigitta Jesica Kartono, Josef Pichlmeier, Helena Berndt, Sai Krishna Mendu, Glenn Johannes Tungka, \"Ozlem G\"ok\c{c}e, Suresh Gehlot, Katherine Pratt, Amanda Minnich, Haon Park
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Benchmarking the Benchmarks: Evaluating Automated Safety Benchmarks for Small Language Models

The paper investigates whether existing AI safety benchmarks, designed for large language models, are suitable for evaluating small language models (SLMs). By testing five benchmark suites on 26 open‑source SLMs with a unified scoring rubric, the authors find that ambiguous judgments dominate, especially for complex prompts and certain architectures. This ambiguity, linked to factors like lexical density and output perplexity, undermines the reliability of aggregate leaderboards and reveals a confound between model capability and perceived safety.

By Nyamtulla Shaik, Fengjun Li, Bo Luo