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IndicSafe: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multilingual LLM Safety in South Asia

Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Sanchari Chowdhuri · Mar 18, 2026 · Citations: 0

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How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood. We present the first systematic evaluation of LLM safety across 12 Indic languages, spoken by over 1.2 billion people but underrepresented in LLM training data. Using a dataset of 6,000 culturally grounded prompts spanning caste, religion, gender, health, and politics, we assess 10 leading LLMs on translated variants of the prompt. Our analysis reveals significant safety drift: cross-language agreement is just 12.8\%, and \texttt{SAFE} rate variance exceeds 17\% across languages. Some models over-refuse benign prompts in low-resource scripts, overflag politically sensitive topics, while others fail to flag unsafe generations. We quantify these failures using prompt-level entropy, category bias scores, and multilingual consistency indices. Our findings highlight critical safety generalization gaps in multilingual LLMs and show that safety alignment does not transfer evenly across languages. We release \textsc{IndicSafe}, the first benchmark to enable culturally informed safety evaluation for Indic deployments, and advocate for language-aware alignment strategies grounded in regional harms.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
  • The abstract does not clearly describe the evaluation setup.
  • The abstract does not clearly name benchmarks or metrics.
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Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

Background context only.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Weak / implicit signal

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 15%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

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What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood."

Evaluation Modes

missing

None explicit

Validate eval design from full paper text.

"As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: Multilingual

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes:
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Research Brief

Metadata summary

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood.
  • We present the first systematic evaluation of LLM safety across 12 Indic languages, spoken by over 1.2 billion people but underrepresented in LLM training data.
  • Using a dataset of 6,000 culturally grounded prompts spanning caste, religion, gender, health, and politics, we assess 10 leading LLMs on translated variants of the prompt.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Agreement / Kappa

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood.
  • We present the first systematic evaluation of LLM safety across 12 Indic languages, spoken by over 1.2 billion people but underrepresented in LLM training data.
  • Our analysis reveals significant safety drift: cross-language agreement is just 12.8\%, and SAFE rate variance exceeds 17\% across languages.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in multilingual settings, their safety behavior in culturally diverse, low-resource languages remains poorly understood.
  • We present the first systematic evaluation of LLM safety across 12 Indic languages, spoken by over 1.2 billion people but underrepresented in LLM training data.

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Gap: Evaluation mode is explicit

    No clear evaluation mode extracted.

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Gap: Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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