arXiv AI

Cross-Lingual Transfer of Evil Vectors Is Directionally Asymmetric

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

Safety Targeted Embedding Exploit via Refinement

Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching. We show that this creates an epistemic gap in which models confidently generate harmful responses for inputs that fall outside the distribution of their safety training.

arXiv AI
Sep 24

Hard Negatives Reveal What Easy Negatives Hide: Cross-Lingual Harmfulness Representations Degrade with Resource Tier Under Hard Negatives

The study investigates how safety alignment in large language models, trained mainly in English, transfers to other languages. While models show near-perfect harmfulness detection (AUROC > 0.98) using unrelated harmless prompts (easy negatives), performance drops sharply in low‑resource languages when using surface‑similar benign prompts (hard negatives). This degradation persists across multiple languages and models, indicating that easy‑negative evaluation alone cannot confirm cross‑lingual harmfulness representation quality.

By Paras Balani, Subhrakanta Panda
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

PRISM: Transfer and Limits of Activation Interventions in Tool-Calling Language Models

PRISM is a framework that evaluates how activation interventions transfer across precision, languages, and model scales to mitigate unsafe tool‑calling behaviors in language models. By leveraging lower‑resource settings such as quantized NF4 labels and cross‑lingual transfer, PRISM demonstrates that alignment improvements can be achieved with minimal scenarios and that these gains transfer to held‑out languages and larger models. The study shows that auxiliary supervision from compressed models and multilingual data can effectively uncover and reduce hazardous tool‑calling behaviors across different model families.

By Giovana Kerche Bon\'as, Thales Sales Almeida, Marcelo da Silva Reis, Rodrigo Nogueira, Marcos Meideiros Raimundo