Cross-Lingual Transfer Effects of LoRA Initialization on Safety Alignment in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Igala via LSR Dual-Probe

Abstract

Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models relies predominantly on English-language training data. When harmful intent is expressed in low-resource languages, refusal mechanisms that hold in English frequently fail to activate. We introduce LSR (Linguistic Safety Robustness), the first systematic benchmark for measuring cross-lingual refusal degradation in West African languages: Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Igala. LSR uses a dual-probe evaluation protocol - submitting matched English and target-language probes to the same model - and introduces Refusal Centroid Drift (RCD), a metric that quantifie

Research Question

What are the cross-lingual transfer effects of LoRA initialization strategies when applied to Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Igala, as evaluated through LSR's dual-probe protocol for safety alignment degradation?

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