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:2508. 10029v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models can still be manipulated through white-box interventions that modify their internal representations.
By Wenpeng Xing, Bohan Yang, Mohan Li, Chunqiang Hu, Haitao Xu, Ningyu Zhang, Bo Lin, Meng Han
Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content. In this work, we reveal that this advanced safety awareness inadvertently introduces a fatal vulnerability.
arXiv:2607. 10112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models remains brittle across languages: prompts reliably refused in English can elicit harmful compliance in non-English and low-resource settings.
By Chigozirim Ifebi, Brent Kong, Ayushi Mehrotra
arXiv:2606. 05614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content.
By Long P. Hoang, Hai V. Le, Shaoyang Xu, Wei Lu, Wenxuan Zhang
arXiv:2512. 14751v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Finetuning pretrained large language models (LLMs) has become the standard paradigm for developing downstream applications.
By Yixin Tan, Zhe Yu, Rui Wen, Jun Sakuma