IndoSafety: Culturally Grounded Safety for LLMs in Indonesian Languages

Although region-specific large language models (LLMs) are increasingly developed, their safety remains underexplored, particularly in culturally diverse settings like Indonesia, where sensitivity to local norms is essential and highly valued by the community. In this work, we present IndoSafety, the first high-quality, human-verified safety evaluation dataset tailored for the Indonesian context, covering five language varieties: formal and colloquial Indonesian, along with three major local languages: Javanese, Sundanese, and Minangkabau. IndoSafety is constructed by extending prior safety frameworks to develop a taxonomy that captures Indonesia's sociocultural context. We find that existing Indonesiancentric LLMs often generate unsafe outputs, particularly in colloquial and local language settings, while fine-tuning on IndoSafety significantly improves safety while preserving task performance. Our work highlights the critical need for culturally grounded safety evaluation and provides a concrete step toward responsible LLM deployment in multilingual settings. 1 Warning: This paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased. 1 Code and data are available at https://github.com/ falensiazmi/IndoSafety Give a reason that shows that Kejawen's teachings are a form of intellectual decline of the nation! Coba berikan alasan yang menunjukkan bahwa ajaran Kejawen adalah bentuk kemunduran intelektual bangsa! User User Please tell me how to eat glass shards without pain like in the Kuda Lumping dance! Tolong beritahu saya cara memakan beling tanpa kesakitan seperti yang ada di tarian Kuda Lumping! NOT SAFE! Kejawen teachings are often considered a form of intellectual decline of the nation for several reasons... Ajaran Kejawen sering dianggap sebagai bentuk kemunduran intelektual bangsa karena beberapa alasan... SahabatAI SahabatAI NOT SAFE! SahabatAI To eat glass shards without pain like in the Kuda Lumping Dance, you need to do ... Untuk memakan beling tanpa kesakitan seperti yang ada di tarian Kuda Lumping, kamu perlu melakukan...