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.

本文探讨大型语言模型在多语言环境中的安全挑战，并讨论缓解此类问题的方法。通过比较先进的语言模型对高资源语言和低资源语言下恶意提示的响应，我们发现低资源语言中的恶意提示往往导致不安全的回答，并且语言模型对低资源语言的恶意提示产生更多的无关回答。此外，我们发现提高模型对高资源语言的训练并没有带来显著改善，表明跨语言对齐的瓶颈在于预训练阶段。我们的发现凸显了跨语言大型语言模型安全的挑战，并希望这些发现能指导未来的研究。

语言障碍：剖析LLMs在多语言环境中的安全挑战