English

Layer-wise Swapping for Generalizable Multilingual Safety

Computation and Language 2026-02-16 v2

Abstract

Despite the rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), safety risks remain a critical challenge for low-resource languages. Existing safety datasets are predominantly English centric, limiting progress in multilingual safety alignment. As a result, low resource expert models, finetuned on their respective instruction datasets, tend to exhibit higher unsafety rates compared to their high resource counterparts. In this work, we propose a safety aware layer swapping method that transfers safety alignment from an English safety expert to low resource language experts without additional training. To further enhance transfer ability, our method adaptively selects or blends modules based on their degree of specialization. Our approach preserves performance on general language understanding tasks while enhancing safety in the target languages. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance to the language expert on general benchmarks such as MMMLU, BELEBELE, and MGSM, while producing more aligned and less harmful responses on the MultiJail safety benchmark.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.22620,
  title  = {Layer-wise Swapping for Generalizable Multilingual Safety},
  author = {Hyunseo Shin and Wonseok Hwang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.22620},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

EACL 2026 main

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:27:13.646Z