Multilingual Safety Alignment Via Sparse Weight Editing
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866918357224128512 |
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| author | Liang, Jiaming Wang, Zhaoxin Wang, Handing |
| author_facet | Liang, Jiaming Wang, Zhaoxin Wang, Handing |
| contents | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant safety disparities across languages, with low-resource languages (LRLs) often bypassing safety guardrails established for high-resource languages (HRLs) like English. Existing solutions, such as multilingual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are computationally expensive and dependent on scarce multilingual safety data. In this work, we propose a novel, training-free alignment framework based on Sparse Weight Editing. Identifying that safety capabilities are localized within a sparse set of safety neurons, we formulate the cross-lingual alignment problem as a constrained linear transformation. We derive a closed-form solution to optimally map the harmful representations of LRLs to the robust safety subspaces of HRLs, while preserving general utility via a null-space projection constraint. Extensive experiments across 8 languages and multiple model families (Llama-3, Qwen-2.5) demonstrate that our method substantially reduces Attack Success Rate (ASR) in LRLs with negligible impact on general reasoning capabilities, all achieved with a single, data-efficient calculation. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_22554 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Multilingual Safety Alignment Via Sparse Weight Editing Liang, Jiaming Wang, Zhaoxin Wang, Handing Machine Learning Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant safety disparities across languages, with low-resource languages (LRLs) often bypassing safety guardrails established for high-resource languages (HRLs) like English. Existing solutions, such as multilingual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are computationally expensive and dependent on scarce multilingual safety data. In this work, we propose a novel, training-free alignment framework based on Sparse Weight Editing. Identifying that safety capabilities are localized within a sparse set of safety neurons, we formulate the cross-lingual alignment problem as a constrained linear transformation. We derive a closed-form solution to optimally map the harmful representations of LRLs to the robust safety subspaces of HRLs, while preserving general utility via a null-space projection constraint. Extensive experiments across 8 languages and multiple model families (Llama-3, Qwen-2.5) demonstrate that our method substantially reduces Attack Success Rate (ASR) in LRLs with negligible impact on general reasoning capabilities, all achieved with a single, data-efficient calculation. |
| title | Multilingual Safety Alignment Via Sparse Weight Editing |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22554 |