The Language Barrier: Dissecting Safety Challenges of LLMs in
  Multilingual Contexts
Lingfeng Shen Weiting Tan Sihao Chen Yunmo Chen Jingyu Zhang Haoran Xu Boyuan Zheng Philipp Koehn Daniel Khashabi
As the influence of large language models (LLMs) spans across global
communities, their safety challenges in multilingual settings become paramount
for alignment research. This paper examines the variations in safety challenges
faced by LLMs across different languages and discusses approaches to
alleviating such concerns. By comparing how state-of-the-art LLMs respond to
the same set of malicious prompts written in higher- vs. lower-resource
languages, we observe that (1) LLMs tend to generate unsafe responses much more
often when a malicious prompt is written in a lower-resource language, and (2)
LLMs tend to generate more irrelevant responses to malicious prompts in
lower-resource languages. To understand where the discrepancy can be
attributed, we study the effect of instruction tuning with reinforcement
learning from human feedback (RLHF) or supervised finetuning (SFT) on the
HH-RLHF dataset. Surprisingly, while training with high-resource languages
improves model alignment, training in lower-resource languages yields minimal
improvement. This suggests that the bottleneck of cross-lingual alignment is
rooted in the pretraining stage. Our findings highlight the challenges in
cross-lingual LLM safety, and we hope they inform future research in this
direction.