Safety That Does Not Transfer: Cross-Lingual Clinical Correctness Drift in Deployable Medical Language Models
Safety evaluation of large language models is conducted predominantly in English and predominantly on frontier systems. Neither condition describes how such models are encountered in low-resource health settings, where small quantised systems are run locally and queried in local languages. We ask whether clinical safety established in English transfers to Hausa, and whether any failure is attributable to the language, the clinical task, or the class of model that low-resource deployment admits. Matched English-Hausa question pairs were built for three conditions of high burden in northern Nigeria: malaria, sickle cell disease, and tuberculosis, probing knowledge recall, emergency triage, ...
| Authors | Anthonio Oladimeji Gabriel, Dimeji Olawuyi, Toba Ajayi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 July 2026 |
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