| Challenge: | Existing safety benchmarks only concern the safety in one language, e.g. the majority language in the pretraining data such as English. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompting method to improve multilingual safety of ChatGPT by enhancing cross-lingual generalization of safety alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can significantly reduce the ratio of unsafe responses by 42% for non-English queries. |
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The Language Barrier: Dissecting Safety Challenges of LLMs in Multilingual Contexts (2024.findings-acl)
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Lingfeng Shen, Weiting Tan, Sihao Chen, Yunmo Chen, Jingyu Zhang, Haoran Xu, Boyuan Zheng, Philipp Koehn, Daniel Khashabi
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that malicious prompt instructions could solicit objectionable content from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They compare how state-of-the-art LLMs respond to malicious prompts in different languages . they find that LLM's generate unsafe responses more often when a prompt is written in a lower-resource language . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate unsafe responses more often when a malicious prompt is written in a lower-resource language, and less irrelevant responses when written in lower-source languages. |
Safety of Large Language Models Beyond English: A Systematic Literature Review of Risks, Biases, and Safeguards (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have a growing number of applications that generate harmful, biased, or unsafe content. |
| Approach: | They synthesize findings from recent studies that evaluate their robustness across languages . they highlight gaps in multilingual safety research and recommend future work . |
| Outcome: | The systematic review examines the multilingual safety of large language models in English . it identifies challenges such as dataset availability and evaluation biases . |
Towards Understanding the Fragility of Multilingual LLMs against Fine-Tuning Attacks (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have sparked concerns about their safety. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify safety-related information in the model parameter space . they propose to use a few adversarially chosen examples to fine-tune LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can break safety alignment in multilingual LLMs using a few examples . it also shows that the proposed method jailbreaks LLM models adapted to new languages . |
Multilingual Blending: Large Language Model Safety Alignment Evaluation with Language Mixture (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | a range of representative Large Language Models have exhibited remarkable generalization capabilities across numerous downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-response scheme to evaluate the safety alignment of LLMs . they found that multilingual query-responding significantly amplifies the detriment of malicious queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme improves the safety alignment of state-of-the-art LLMs under multilingual conditions. |
SafeLawBench: Towards Safe Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Chuxue Cao, Han Zhu, Jiaming Ji, Qichao Sun, Zhenghao Zhu, Wu Yinyu, Josef Dai, Yaodong Yang, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that large language models (LLMs) may exhibit risks, including threats to the protection of private data and the generation of hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs from a legal perspective using the SafeLawBench benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework categorizes safety risks into three levels based on legal standards and includes 24,860 multi-choice questions and 1,106 open-domain question-answering tasks. |
The State of Multilingual LLM Safety Research: From Measuring The Language Gap To Mitigating It (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a systematic review of 300 publications reveals a language gap in LLM safety research . even high-resource non-English languages receive little attention, authors note . |
| Approach: | They propose to focus on safety evaluation, training data generation, and crosslingual safety generalization based on their findings. |
| Outcome: | The authors suggest that the field can develop more robust, inclusive safety practices for diverse global populations. |
Don’t Trust ChatGPT when your Question is not in English: A Study of Multilingual Abilities and Types of LLMs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that large language models can perform a wide variety of language tasks when presented in English. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate the multilingual capabilities of large language models using a prompt back-translation method to find out how LLMs acquire their multilingual abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that large language models can transfer learned knowledge across different languages, but struggle to provide accurate results in translation-variant tasks. |
Multilingual Refusal Alignment for Safer Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used globally, but their safety and alignment can vary unpredictably between languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual refusal alignment dataset to investigate whether alignment transfers cross-lingually and how language consistency is preserved during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained on multilingual datasets without affecting general performance. |
Soteria: Language-Specific Functional Parameter Steering for Multilingual Safety Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Soteria locates and minimally adjusts the “functional heads” most responsible for harmful content generation in each language. |
| Approach: | Soteria locates and minimally adjusts the "functional heads" responsible for harmful content generation in each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces harmful content generation in languages while preserving model performance. |
Is Safety Standard Same for Everyone? User-Specific Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yeonjun In, Wonjoong Kim, Kanghoon Yoon, Sungchul Kim, Mehrab Tanjim, Sangwu Park, Kibum Kim, Chanyoung Park
| Challenge: | Extensive benchmarks evaluate LLM safety relying heavily on general standards . no benchmark datasets exist to evaluate the user-specific safety of LLMs . |
| Approach: | a new benchmark is designed to assess user-specific aspect of LLM safety . authors propose a simple remedy based on chain-of-thought to improve user-specified safety. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the user-specific aspect of LLM safety . the proposed solution improves user-specified safety by chain-of-thought . |