LLMs Lost in Translation: M-ALERT uncovers Cross-Linguistic Safety Gaps

Autor: Friedrich, Felix, Tedeschi, Simone, Schramowski, Patrick, Brack, Manuel, Navigli, Roberto, Nguyen, Huu, Li, Bo, Kersting, Kristian
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
Popis: Building safe Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple languages is essential in ensuring both safe access and linguistic diversity. To this end, we introduce M-ALERT, a multilingual benchmark that evaluates the safety of LLMs in five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. M-ALERT includes 15k high-quality prompts per language, totaling 75k, following the detailed ALERT taxonomy. Our extensive experiments on 10 state-of-the-art LLMs highlight the importance of language-specific safety analysis, revealing that models often exhibit significant inconsistencies in safety across languages and categories. For instance, Llama3.2 shows high unsafety in the category crime_tax for Italian but remains safe in other languages. Similar differences can be observed across all models. In contrast, certain categories, such as substance_cannabis and crime_propaganda, consistently trigger unsafe responses across models and languages. These findings underscore the need for robust multilingual safety practices in LLMs to ensure safe and responsible usage across diverse user communities.
Databáze: arXiv