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.
arXiv:2608. 14626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in safety alignment, yet their safety guarantees remain significantly weaker in low-resource and multilingual settings than in high-resource languages.
By Valdini Douglace Lemofouet, Blessing Ngozi Uzor, Paula Chikaodinaka Anyanwu, Danielle Blanche Kapsa, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, P Sam Sahil, Abigail Oppong, Tassallah Abdullahi, Clemencia Siro, Idris Abdulmumin, Seid Muhie Yimam, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad
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.
By Naymul Islam, Nusrat Jahan Lia, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Sabik Bin Sultan, Abdullah Khan Zehady
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: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
Multilingual safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly relied on direct translation (DT) of English benchmarks into target languages - an approach that converts surface-level linguistic form while failing to reflect the cultural context embedded in threat scenarios, social norms, and legal frameworks. We construct paired DT and culturally-adapted (CA) datasets via 1:1 seed matching for four languages - Korean (KO), Japanese (JA), Thai (TH), and Khmer (KM) - and compare Attack Success Rate (ASR) and Cultural Realism scores across four open-source LLM.