Decided Upstream, Written Late: Locating and Pricing the Cross-Lingual Refusal Circuit of a Multilingual MoE

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.08032v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment in multilingual models is uneven: a model that reliably refuses a harmful request in English will often comply with the same request in a lower-resource language. We trace this gap mechanistically in sarvam, an Indic-multilingual mixture-of-experts reasoning model, and find it is not a failure to detect harm. Harm is encoded as an internal direction that is nearly language-invariant in mid-network (English-vs-Indic cosine