BanglaVeilGuard: Cross-Script Safety Benchmarking and Lightweight Guardrails for Bangla Large Language Models

arXiv:2608.21880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bangla large language model (LLM) safety is difficult to evaluate with English-centric or standard-script benchmarks because Bangla users routinely write across scripts, spellings, code-mixed forms, and regional registers. This paper presents BanglaVeilGuard, a compact Bangla-first safety benchmark and lightweight prompt guard for six language forms: standard Bangla, Romanized Bangla, Banglish, code-mixed Bangla--English, noisy Bangla, and dialectal Bangla. The benchmark contains 2,366 quality-filtered prompts and a held-out 354-prompt evaluation split spanning unsafe, safe, and safe-sensitive requests. BanglaVeilGuard uses non-destructive multi-view normalization with a prompt-risk classifier and thresholded pre-generation gate, allowing it to screen prompts for heterogeneous target models without changing their weights. Across target-model families, guarded runs reduce attack success under deterministic response scoring from 93.8--100.0% to 6.3% for Claude Opus 4.8, BanglaLLama, and TituLLM; TigerLLM-1B with BanglaVeilGuard achieves 78.2% accuracy with 8.8% ASR. The prompt guard also attains 88.5% unsafe recall, substantially above the evaluated prompt-only guard baselines. The main remaining cost is over-refusal on dialectal and noisy benign prompts, revealing a concrete safety-helpfulness frontier for Bangla LLM deployment.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-08-25