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Multilingual Jailbreak Challenges in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2310.06474 v3 pith:ADB2YYD2 submitted 2023-10-10 cs.CL

Multilingual Jailbreak Challenges in Large Language Models

classification cs.CL
keywords llmsmultilingualmaliciousscenariochatgptcontentdataexhibit
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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While large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, they pose potential safety concerns, such as the ``jailbreak'' problem, wherein malicious instructions can manipulate LLMs to exhibit undesirable behavior. Although several preventive measures have been developed to mitigate the potential risks associated with LLMs, they have primarily focused on English. In this study, we reveal the presence of multilingual jailbreak challenges within LLMs and consider two potential risky scenarios: unintentional and intentional. The unintentional scenario involves users querying LLMs using non-English prompts and inadvertently bypassing the safety mechanisms, while the intentional scenario concerns malicious users combining malicious instructions with multilingual prompts to deliberately attack LLMs. The experimental results reveal that in the unintentional scenario, the rate of unsafe content increases as the availability of languages decreases. Specifically, low-resource languages exhibit about three times the likelihood of encountering harmful content compared to high-resource languages, with both ChatGPT and GPT-4. In the intentional scenario, multilingual prompts can exacerbate the negative impact of malicious instructions, with astonishingly high rates of unsafe output: 80.92\% for ChatGPT and 40.71\% for GPT-4. To handle such a challenge in the multilingual context, we propose a novel \textsc{Self-Defense} framework that automatically generates multilingual training data for safety fine-tuning. Experimental results show that ChatGPT fine-tuned with such data can achieve a substantial reduction in unsafe content generation. Data is available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multilingual-safety-for-LLMs}.

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Cited by 31 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Same Model, Different Weakness: How Language and Modality Reshape the Jailbreak Attack Surface in Frontier MLLMs

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    Jailbreak vulnerability in MLLMs is language- and modality-dependent, producing rank reversals in model safety between English and Spanish conditions.

  2. Beyond Pass/Fail: Using Process Mining to Understand How LLMs Resist (and Fail) Red Team Attacks

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Process mining on 8575 red teaming events shows GPT-OSS has a near-absorbing refusal state while Llama 3.3 has porous escape routes, with asymmetric mutator effects and differing time-to-jailbreak distributions.

  3. Low-Resource Safety Failures Are Action Failures, Not Representation Failures

    cs.CL 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    Low-resource safety failures are action failures because the harmfulness representation transfers but the decision calibration does not; this is fixed by recalibrating a high-resource gate with 1-4 target-language examples.

  4. SomaliBench Eval: Measuring English-to-Somali Refusal Gaps in Open-Weight Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SomaliBench finds large English-to-Somali refusal gaps (0.38 to 0.90) across Llama-3.1-8B, Gemma-2-9B, Qwen-2.5-7B, and Aya-23-8B, with many Somali responses being unclear rather than compliant.

  5. RoboJailBench: Benchmarking Adversarial Attacks and Defenses in Embodied Robotic Agents

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    RoboJailBench creates a taxonomy-based benchmark, intent-contrast datasets, and evaluation framework for jailbreak attacks and defenses in embodied robotic AI systems.

  6. ROK-FORTRESS: Measuring the Effect of Geopolitical Transcreation for National Security and Public Safety

    cs.CL 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    On a bilingual NSPS benchmark, Korean language consistently lowers harmful compliance (~10pp TRS), Korean grounding often mitigates that drop, and open- vs closed-source models reverse under direct requests.

  7. ROK-FORTRESS: Measuring the Effect of Geopolitical Transcreation for National Security and Public Safety

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    ROK-FORTRESS shows Korean-language prompts increase LLM safety suppression compared with English, while Korean geopolitical grounding often reduces that suppression, indicating translation-only evaluations miss langua...

  8. XL-SafetyBench: A Country-Grounded Cross-Cultural Benchmark for LLM Safety and Cultural Sensitivity

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    XL-SafetyBench is a new cross-cultural benchmark showing frontier LLMs decouple jailbreak robustness from cultural sensitivity while local models trade off attack success against neutral-safe rates in a near-linear pa...

  9. BIASEDTALES-ML: A Multilingual Dataset for Analyzing Narrative Attribute Distributions in LLM-Generated Stories

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    BiasedTales-ML provides a parallel multilingual corpus of LLM-generated children's stories that reveals substantial cross-lingual differences in narrative attributes not captured by English-centric analyses.

  10. SelfGrader: LLM Jailbreak Detection via Anchored Token-Level Logits

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SelfGrader detects LLM jailbreaks by interpreting logit distributions on numerical tokens with a dual maliciousness-benignness score, cutting attack success rates up to 22.66% while using up to 173x less memory and 26...

  11. SecureWebArena: A Holistic Security Evaluation Benchmark for LVLM-based Web Agents

    cs.CR 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SecureWebArena is a new benchmark suite for holistic security evaluation of LVLM-based web agents using diverse simulated environments, attack taxonomies, and multi-layered failure analysis across reasoning, behavior,...

  12. Semantic Integrity Matters: Benchmarking and Preserving High-Density Reasoning in KV Cache Compression

    cs.CL 2025-02 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    KV cache compression causes task-dependent degradation in high-density reasoning due to disrupted CoT links; ShotKV mitigates this by preserving few-shot examples as indivisible semantic units through phase separation...

  13. Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack

    cs.CR 2024-04 conditional novelty 7.0

    Crescendo is a multi-turn escalation jailbreak that achieves high success rates on GPT-4, Gemini, Llama, and Claude by building on the model's prior responses, with an automated tool outperforming prior attacks on AdvBench.

  14. Minionese: Comprehensive Benchmark and Mechanistic Study of Multilingual LLM Safety

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5

    Multilingual jailbreaks succeed mainly by routing harm through misaligned residual subspaces that under-project onto an intact, effectively one-dimensional cross-lingual refusal direction.

  15. Large Language Models for Code Generation from Multilingual Prompts: A Curated Benchmark and a Study on Code Quality

    cs.SE 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Prompt language affects LLM code generation, but English is not consistently best: Chinese prompts improve Python correctness on CoderEval, while quality and lexicon effects vary by model and programming language.

  16. CHASE: Adversarial Red-Blue Teaming for Improving LLM Safety using Reinforcement Learning

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CHASE uses co-evolutionary RL with GRPO to harden LLMs against black-box prompt-rewriting attacks, cutting mean StrongREJECT scores by 43.2% on held-out families while keeping zero false refusals on benign prompts.

  17. Why Do Safety Guardrails Degrade Across Languages?

    cs.CL 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    A latent variable IRT framework decouples four safety-driving factors across 61 model configurations and 10 languages using 1.9 million evaluations, revealing that safety is largely unidimensional and that high cross-...

  18. COMPASS: COntinual Multilingual PEFT with Adaptive Semantic Sampling

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    COMPASS uses semantic clustering on multilingual embeddings to select auxiliary data for PEFT adapters, outperforming linguistic-similarity baselines on multilingual benchmarks while supporting continual adaptation.

  19. Dictionary-Aligned Concept Control for Safeguarding Multimodal LLMs

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DACO curates a 15,000-concept dictionary from 400K image-caption pairs and uses it to initialize an SAE that enables granular, concept-specific steering of MLLM activations, raising safety scores on MM-SafetyBench and...

  20. TrajGuard: Streaming Hidden-state Trajectory Detection for Decoding-time Jailbreak Defense

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    TrajGuard detects jailbreaks by tracking how hidden-state trajectories move toward high-risk regions during decoding, achieving 95% defense rate with 5.2 ms/token latency across tested attacks.

  21. SelfGrader: LLM Jailbreak Detection via Anchored Token-Level Logits

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SelfGrader grades query harmfulness from anchored numerical-token logits plus PAC-guided dual-perspective ICL, claiming strong jailbreak detection with low FPR and latency.

  22. Response-Based Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Jailbreak Prevention Unwittingly Compromises Safety

    cs.CL 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Distilling safe refusal behavior from OpenAI o1-mini into Llama-3, Gemma-2, and Qwen3 models via response-based LoRA on multilingual jailbreak data increases jailbreak success rates on MultiJail by up to 16.6 points.

  23. JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Models

    cs.CR 2024-03 accept novelty 6.0

    JailbreakBench supplies an evolving set of jailbreak prompts, a 100-behavior dataset aligned with usage policies, a standardized evaluation framework, and a leaderboard to enable comparable assessments of attacks and ...

  24. Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4

    cs.CL 2023-10 conditional novelty 6.0

    Translating unsafe inputs to low-resource languages jailbreaks GPT-4 at rates on par with or exceeding state-of-the-art attacks.

  25. How Jailbreak Attacks Inform Safety Alignment: A Defender-Centric, Shapley-Based Evaluation of Jailbreak Contributions

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Attacks that break LLMs best are not the ones that improve safety most; a Shapley- and greedy-based framework that selects attack subsets by downstream defender utility outperforms attacker-centric and attribution-onl...

  26. An Empirical Evaluation of Prompt Injection Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models Across Multilingual and Obfuscated Attack Scenarios

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Empirical tests across six LLMs show systematic prompt injection vulnerabilities, with higher malicious compliance in non-English languages and complex obfuscated prompts.

  27. A Red Teaming Framework for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Faithfulness Evaluation

    cs.CL 2026-06 conditional novelty 5.0

    A multi-role red-teaming framework with attacker, target, and jury LLMs measures faithfulness in English and Arabic, finding false-premise prompts and length limits change unfaithfulness rates.

  28. Multilingual jailbreaking of LLMs using low-resource languages

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Multi-turn prompts in Afrikaans, Kiswahili, isiXhosa and isiZulu achieve 52-83% harmful response rates across GPT, Claude, Gemini and others, rising further with native-speaker red-teaming, showing translation quality...

  29. A Red Teaming Framework for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Faithfulness Evaluation

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Introduces a multi-role red teaming framework using attacker and jury models that increases attack success rates by up to 7.9% on LLM faithfulness in question-answering tasks.

  30. Opir: Efficient Multi-Task Safety Classification for Toxicity, Jailbreaks, Hate Speech, and Harmful Content

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Opir introduces efficient multi-task encoder models trained on a 996-category safety taxonomy that match or exceed larger baselines on most safety benchmarks while using under 100M parameters for edge variants.

  31. From AI-Generated Content to Agentic Action: Security and Safety Threats in Generative AI

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    The paper analyzes evolving security and safety threats in generative AI from content generation to agentic actions, noting that attack surfaces expand faster than defenses and that many safeguards require institution...