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
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.
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: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