Refusal Direction is Universal Across Safety-Aligned Languages

Understand

Refusal mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring safety.

• Recent research has revealed that refusal behavior can be mediated by a single direction in activation space, enabling targeted interventions to bypass refusals.
• While this is primarily demonstrated in an English-centric context, appropriate refusal behavior is important for any language, but poorly understood.
• In this paper, we investigate the refusal behavior in LLMs across 14 languages using PolyRefuse, a multilingual safety dataset created by translating malicious and benign English prompts into these languages.