Safety Kernel: Mechanistic Alignment for Cross-Lingual Defense in LLMs

Summary

Researchers analyze cross-lingual safety behavior in large language models at the neuron level and identify a compact set of safety-related neurons shared across languages, called the safety kernel (SK). They introduce SK-Masked LoRA, which restricts LoRA adaptation to the feed-forward network output dimensions corresponding to the SK. According to the paper, this substantially reduces attack success rates across multiple languages, including languages excluded from SK discovery, while changing only a small fraction of neuron coordinates.

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