Cross-lingual guardrail auditing & inference steering tools.

In our recent paper accepted at ICML 2026 GlobalSouthML workshop, we show that frontier models are broken across languages. They refuse harmful prompts in English but comply when  those same prompts are inputted in low-resource languages like Yoruba, Igala, Hausa, Igbo, or Swahili. We then used a training-free mechanistic method called LSR-Anchoring that uses Sparse Autoencoders-derived activation steering to clamp the English refusal direction to the low resource language prompt at inference time. The method recovered safety successfully in Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, and Hausa without degradation in capabilities. Here's the link: My ICLM paper; https://icml.cc/virtual/2026/78353.

The paper published for phase 1 of the research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19273

This project builds the production engineering tools to fix that problem. We're creating a unified suite of open-source tools to audit and patch these latent cross-lingual jailbreak vectors at inference time.

The focus is mostly on shipping functional engineering codes. We don't need expensive retraining, as labelled safety dataset is not even available at scale for these low-resource languages, hence, this training-free method. Instead, our tools inject language agnostic Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) features directly into model inference pipelines. This stops harmful refusal failure without significant degradation in benign capabilities. I am the solo engineer on this project, pairing with native speaker annotators to validate the evaluation suites.

What we want to deliver:

1. A cross lingual steering tensor library; pre-computed, optimized SAE feature IDs and dense steering weights for Llama-3.1-8b, Llama3.3-70b, Mistral-7b, and qwen-2.5-7b covering Arabic, Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, Hausa, and Swahili.

2. Automated guardrails evaluation benchmark plugged into the UK AISI inspect platform so external red-teamers can automatically stress-test models for cross-lingual safety collapse.

3. A technical paper containing deployment rules, interference thresholds, and calculated failure zones for safety engineers.