license: mit
language:
- yo
- ha
- ig
- sw
- ar
- en
tags: - safety
- mechanistic-interpretability
- activation-steering
- multilingual
- low-resource-languages
- refusal
- llm-safety
- african-languages
pretty_name: LSR Anchoring — Cross-Lingual Safety Steering Results
size_categories: - n<1K
LSR Anchoring — Cross-Lingual Safety Steering Results
This dataset contains all experimental results, activation caches, and run logs
for the paper:
Latent Space Refusal Anchoring for Low-Resource African Languages:
Mechanistic Safety Recovery Without Retraining
The method uses Mean Activation Steering and Sparse Autoencoder (SAE)-derived mean-activation directions
(anchors) extracted from a source language (English) and applies them at
inference time to steer model behaviour on harmful prompts across 6 languages
and 4 model families — with no fine-tuning required.
Languages Covered
| Code | Language | Family | Resource Level |
|---|---|---|---|
yo |
Yoruba | Niger-Congo | Low |
ha |
Hausa | Afro-Asiatic | Low |
ig |
Igbo | Niger-Congo | Low |
ig |
Igala | Niger-Congo | Very Low |
sw |
Swahili | Bantu | Mid |
ar |
Arabic | Semitic | High |
Models Evaluated
| Model | Path | Anchor Layer | Method |
|---|---|---|---|
meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct |
Path A (SAE) + Path B (Mean-Act) | 12 | Both |
meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct |
Path B (Mean-Act) | 26 | Mean-Act |
mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 |
Path B (Mean-Act) | 16 | Mean-Act |
Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct |
Path B (Mean-Act) | 26 | Mean-Act |
Evaluation Setup
- Harmful prompts: 100 per language (manually curated, safety-relevant)
- Benign prompts: 50 per language (neutral control set)
- Alpha sweep: α ∈ {5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70} for all models
- Metrics:
- SRR — Steered Refusal Rate (harmful prompts refused after steering)
- DPL — Delta Precision Loss (benign refusal rate increase)
- KL — KL divergence of output distribution post-steering
- Collapse — Boolean flag for output degeneration
Repository Structure
lsr-anchoring-results/
│
├── llama-3-8b-path-a/ ← Llama-3.1 8B, SAE-based steering (Path A)
│ ├── results_rows.csv/json
│ ├── anchor_cache.json
│ └── logs/
│
├── llama-3-8b-path-b/ ← Llama-3.1 8B, Mean-Activation steering (Path B)
│ ├── results_8b_pathB_rows.csv/json
│ └── anchor_cache_8b_pathB.json
│
├── llama-3-70b/ ← Llama-3.1 70B, Mean-Activation steering
│ ├── results_70b_rows.csv/json
│ ├── anchor_cache.json
│ └── logs/
│
├── mistral-7b/ ← Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, Mean-Activation steering
│ ├── results_mistral7b_rows.csv/json
│ ├── anchor_cache_mistral7b.json
│ └── logs/
│
├── qwen2.5-7b/ ← Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Mean-Activation steering
│ ├── results_qwen7b_rows.csv/json
│ ├── anchor_cache_qwen7b.json
│ └── logs/
│
├── data/ ← Cross-model summary files
│ ├── results_multilang_v3.json
│ └── results_phase2b_all.json
│
└── mmlu/ ← MMLU capability preservation results
├── mmlu_results.csv
├── mmlu_results.json
├── mmlu_70b_results.json
├── mmlu_qwen_results.json
└── mmlu_fine_alpha_results.json
Key Results Summary
| Model | Best Language | Peak SRR | KL at Peak | DPL at Peak |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Llama-3.1 8B (Path A) | Igala | 0.844 | 0.31 | 0.06 |
| Llama-3.1 8B (Path B) | Hausa | 0.71 | 0.48 | 0.12 |
| Llama-3.1 70B | Hausa | 0.62 | 0.29 | 0.08 |
| Mistral-7B | Igbo | 0.58 | 0.22 | 0.04 |
| Qwen2.5-7B | Hausa | 0.51 | 0.49 | 0.50 |
Notable finding: Arabic exhibits inverse transfer on Qwen2.5-7B — the
English-derived refusal direction actively reduces refusal rates on Arabic
harmful prompts as alpha increases (SRR → −0.10 at α=70), suggesting English
SAE directions do not generalise to Arabic in this model family.
Citation
@misc{anonymouslsranchoring2026,
title = {Latent Space Refusal Anchoring for Low-Resource African Languages:
Mechanistic Safety Recovery Without Retraining},
author = {Anonymous},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/anon-lsr-2026/lsr-anchoring-results}
}
Code
All experiment scripts and prompt sets are available at:
https://anonymous.4open.science/r/lsr-anchoring-1546/
License
MIT License.