Karolina Seweryn


2026

Most vision-language models (VLMs) are trained on English-centric data, limiting their performance in other languages and cultural contexts. This restricts their usability for non-English-speaking users and hinders the development of multimodal systems that reflect diverse linguistic and cultural realities. In this work, we reproduce and adapt the LLaVA-Next methodology to create a set of Polish VLMs. We rely on a fully automated pipeline for translating and filtering existing multimodal datasets, and complement this with synthetic Polish data for OCR and culturally specific tasks. Despite relying almost entirely on automatic translation and minimal manual intervention, our approach yields strong results: we observe a +9.5 pp improvement over LLaVA-1.6-Vicuna-13B on a Polish-adapted MMBench, along with higher-quality captions in generative evaluations, as measured by human annotators in terms of linguistic correctness. These findings highlight that large-scale automated translation, combined with lightweight filtering, can effectively bootstrap high-quality multimodal models for low-resource languages. Some challenges remain, particularly in cultural coverage and evaluation. To facilitate further research, we release our models, code, and datasets.
Large language models (LLMs) require careful alignment to balance competing objectives: factuality, safety, conciseness, proactivity, and diversity. Existing studies focus on individual techniques or specific dimensions, lacking a holistic assessment of the inherent trade-offs. We propose a unified evaluation framework that compares LLM alignment methods (PPO, DPO, ORPO, KTO) across these five axes, using both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets. Leveraging a specialized LLM-as-Judge prompt, validated through human studies, we reveal that DPO and KTO excel in factual accuracy, PPO and DPO lead in safety, and PPO best balances conciseness with proactivity. Our findings provide insights into trade-offs of common alignment methods, guiding the development of more balanced and reliable LLMs.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, ensuring their safety across multiple languages has become a critical concern. While LLMs demonstrate impressive capabilities in English, their safety mechanisms may not generalize effectively to other languages, leading to disparities in toxicity detection, bias mitigation, and harm prevention. This systematic review examines the multilingual safety of LLMs by synthesizing findings from recent studies that evaluate their robustness across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts beyond English language. Our review explores the methodologies used to assess multilingual safety, identifies challenges such as dataset availability and evaluation biases. Based on our analysis we highlight gaps in multilingual safety research and provide recommendations for future work. This review aims to contribute to the development of fair and effective safety mechanisms for LLMs across all languages. We provide the extracted data in an interactive Streamlit dashboard, enabling transparent access to the raw data and allowing for continuous updates.

2025

Alignment is the critical process of minimizing harmful outputs by teaching large language models (LLMs) to prefer safe, helpful and appropriate responses. While the majority of alignment research and datasets remain overwhelmingly English-centric, ensuring safety across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts requires localized resources. In this paper, we introduce the first Polish preference dataset PLLuM-Align, created entirely through human annotation to reflect Polish language and cultural nuances. The dataset includes response rating, ranking, and multi-turn dialog data. Designed to reflect the linguistic subtleties and cultural norms of Polish, this resource lays the groundwork for more aligned Polish LLMs and contributes to the broader goal of multilingual alignment in underrepresented languages.
We present a benchmark dataset for evaluating language model safety in Polish, addressing the underrepresentation of medium-resource languages in existing safety assessments. Our dataset includes both original and adversarially perturbed examples. We fine-tune and evaluate multiple models—LlamaGuard-3-8B, a HerBERT-based classifier, and PLLuM—and find that the HerBERT-based model outperforms others, especially under adversarial conditions.