IndicGuard: A Multilingual Safety Guard Model and Dataset for Indic Languages

Existing safety evaluation datasets for large language models (LLMs) predominantly focus on English and Western contexts, often overlooking the linguistic diversity and culturally grounded safety risks present in other languages. To address this gap, we introduce SurakshaEval, a novel safety benchmark composed of human-written prompts spanning real-world scenarios, explicitly designed for ten major Indian languages - Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu, along with English. SurakshaEval includes both generic prompts common across India and region- and language-specific prompts that capture localized sociocultural sensitivities. We benchmark a broad range of state-of-the-art LLMs on SurakshaEval, establish baseline safety performance, and identify recurring failure modes, including over-refusal, missed detection of implicit bias, and insufficient contextual awareness in regionally sensitive settings. Our results show that even strong multilingual LLMs struggle to reliably meet nuanced safety requirements when operating in Indic languages, particularly in native scripts. These findings highlight the urgent need for safety evaluation frameworks that incorporate region-specific data and structured assessment protocols, enabling the development and deployment of AI systems that operate securely, ethically, and in alignment with diverse societal values. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/debobanerjee/SurakshaEval. Warning: This paper contains text that may be offensive or unsafe.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in multilingual settings, yet their safety is still evaluated primarily in English. This limits our understanding of how alignment failures manifest in low-resource and culturally diverse languages. We introduce IndicSafeEval, a persuasion-based jailbreak evaluation framework for Indian languages. Our benchmark combines ten safety critical content categories with six human-like persuasive strategies across four different Indian languages, such as Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi, resulting in 7,200 adversarial prompts. We conduct a systematic black-box evaluation of several open-source LLMs to examine how their safety behaviour varies across languages, persuasion strategies, and risk categories. Our analysis shows that the model does not behave equally safely across all languages and prompt styles. Instead, safety performance depends strongly on both the languages used and the way a request is phrased using persuasive cues. We further observe that different risk categories exhibit different levels of vulnerability, with some types of harmful content being significantly more susceptible to persuasion-based jailbreaks than others. These findings reveal important limitations of current safety evaluations, which are largely English-centric, and underscore the need for multilingual and persuasion-aware benchmarking frameworks to more accurately assess real-world LLM safety. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/MonSaikat/IndicSafeEval. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive or harmful.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in cross-linguistic contexts, ensuring safety in diverse regulatory and cultural environments has become a critical challenge. However, existing multilingual benchmarks largely rely on general risk taxonomies and machine translation, which confines guardrail models to these predefined categories and hinders their ability to align with region-specific regulations and cultural nuances. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ML-Bench, a policy-grounded multilingual safety benchmark covering 14 languages. ML-Bench is constructed directly from regional regulations, where risk categories and fine-grained rules derived from jurisdiction-specific legal texts are directly used to guide the generation of multilingual safety data, enabling culturally and legally aligned evaluation across languages. Building on ML-Bench, we develop ML-Guard, a Diffusion Large Language Model (dLLM)-based guardrail model that supports multilingual safety judgment and policy-conditioned compliance assessment. ML-Guard has two variants, one 1.5B lightweight model for fast `safe/unsafe' checking and a more capable 7B model for customized compliance checking with detailed explanations. We conduct extensive experiments against 11 strong guardrail baselines across 6 existing multilingual safety benchmarks and our ML-Bench, and show that ML-Guard consistently outperforms prior methods. We hope that ML-Bench and ML-Guard can help advance the development of regulation-aware and culturally aligned multilingual guardrail systems.