When Safety Speaks a Language: A Mechanistic Analysis of Safety-Language Identity Entanglement in LLMs

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the aipentium editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为大语言模型、生成式AI、ChatGPT相关技术、计算机视觉、深度学习等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) degrades across languages, yet the internal mechanism driving this asymmetry remains poorly understood. Our work, therefore, presents a systematic mechanistic analysis of multilingual safety using sparse autoencoder (SAE) features, sparse interpretable directions in the residual stream associated with harmful and harmless model behavior across three instruction-tuned LLMs, eight languages, and all model layers. We observe that safety-relevant features are architecture-dependent in terms of where they are located and how they are distributed across layers. Additionally, they are geometrically entangled with language identity and exhibit cross-lingual sharing patterns, i.e., languages share safety features to varying degrees across model depths and architectures. This safety-language entanglement has direct consequences such that ablating safety features impacts not only harmful response rates but also target language, with the degree of intervention predicted by the relationship between safety and language features. Our findings qualify the language-universality of safety alignment as architecture-dependent and offer a mechanistic account of multilingual safety interventions.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

Comments