# LLM Safety Alignment in Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14626 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14626/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 37 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/safety-alignment-and-jailbreak-attacks/)
- LLM safety and security / [Safety alignment, refusal and guardrails](https://mlsanity.com/safety/safety-alignment-refusal-and-guardrails/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02446/) (2023)
- [The Language Barrier: Dissecting Safety Challenges of LLMs in Multilingual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13136/) (2024)
- [PolyGuard: A Multilingual Safety Moderation Tool for 17 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04377/) (2025)
- [The State of Multilingual LLM Safety Research: From Measuring the Language Gap to Mitigating It](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24119/) (2025)
- [Refusal Direction is Universal Across Safety-Aligned Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17306/) (2025)
- [CultureGuard: Towards Culturally-Aware Dataset and Guard Model for Multilingual Safety Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01710/) (2025)
- [MPO: Multilingual Safety Alignment via Reward Gap Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16869/) (2025)
- [Soteria: Language-Specific Functional Parameter Steering for Multilingual Safety Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11244/) (2025)
- [MrGuard: A Multilingual Reasoning Guardrail for Universal LLM Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15241/) (2025)
- [Align Once, Benefit Multilingually: Enforcing Multilingual Consistency for LLM Safety Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16660/) (2026)
- [Who Transfers Safety? Identifying and Targeting Cross-Lingual Shared Safety Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01283/) (2026)
- [IndoSafety: Culturally Grounded Safety for LLMs in Indonesian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02573/) (2025)
- [LionGuard 2: Building Lightweight, Data-Efficient & Localised Multilingual Content Moderators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15339/) (2025)
- [Safe at the Margins: A General Approach to Safety Alignment in Low-Resource English Languages -- A Singlish Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12485/) (2025)
- [The Hidden Space of Safety: Understanding Preference-Tuned LLMs in Multilingual context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02708/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Safety Alignment Via Sparse Weight Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22554/) (2026)
- [Do Methods to Jailbreak and Defend LLMs Generalize Across Languages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00689/) (2025)
- [UbuntuGuard: A Culturally-Grounded Policy Benchmark for Equitable AI Safety in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12696/) (2026)
- [IndicJR: A Judge-Free Benchmark of Jailbreak Robustness in South Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16832/) (2026)
- [Aligning Large Language Models to Low-Resource Languages through LLM-Based Selective Translation: A Systematic Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14304/) (2025)
- [Translate, then Detect: Leveraging Machine Translation for Cross-Lingual Toxicity Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14493/) (2025)
- [Response-Based Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Jailbreak Prevention Unwittingly Compromises Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11157/) (2025)
- [TFD: A Comprehensive Structured Tibetan Foundation Dataset for Low-Resource Language Processing and Large-Scale Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18288/) (2025)
- [Surfacing Subtle Stereotypes: A Multilingual, Debate-Oriented Evaluation of Modern LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01187/) (2025)
- [IndicSafe: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multilingual LLM Safety in South Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17915/) (2026)
- [Evaluating LLMs Robustness in Less Resourced Languages with Proxy Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07645/) (2025)
- [CREST: Universal Safety Guardrails Through Cluster-Guided Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02711/) (2025)
- [Layer-wise Swapping for Generalizable Multilingual Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22620/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in safety alignment, yet their safety guarantees remain significantly weaker in low-resource and multilingual settings than in high-resource languages. In this paper, we conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of LLM safety alignment in low-resource languages by adopting the PRISMA 2020 methodology. Out of roughly 1,500 papers identified from Semantic Scholar, arXiv, and OpenAlex, 50 relevant studies have been selected and analyzed. Our review is organized around four themes: safety alignment methods, multilingual safety risks, evaluation benchmarks, and cross-lingual transferability. We further propose a taxonomy of safety alignment approaches based on three adaptation mechanisms: data adaptation, objective optimization, and mechanistic alignment. Across literature, translated English benchmarks fail to sufficiently represent culturally rooted harms, and multilingual models are more vulnerable to cross-lingual jailbreaks, code-switching attacks, and safety degradation in underrepresented languages. These failures are driven by several key factors, including uneven multilingual pre-training coverage, insufficient native-language preference data, poor transfer of safety representations, and a lack of culturally aware evaluation frameworks. The review also notes that many low-resource languages, especially African languages, have fewer safety benchmarks available than other multilingual regions. Overall, the results reveal a persistent multilingual safety gap, and suggest that future progress will require culturally grounded benchmarks, participatory data collection, balanced multilingual pre-training, and scalable multilingual alignment methods.