SalamahBench: Dialect and Category Level Safety Evaluation of Arabic Language Models

arXiv:2603.04410v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While different stakeholders are trying to leverage Arabic Language Models (ALMs), safety alignment in ALMs remains largely underexplored, hindering their mainstream adoption. Existing safety benchmarks are predominantly English-centric and evaluate Arabic only in its standardized form, obscuring fine-grained safety vulnerabilities in Arabic NLP systems. This paper introduces SalamahBench, a unified benchmark of 8{,}270 human-verified harmful prompts across ML Commons hazard categories, each rendered in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and five regional Arabic varieties, namely Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi, Lebanese, and Moroccan, for a total of 49{,}620 paired instances. To analyze the resulting data, we introduce two complementary metrics, namely Dialect Shift, which measures a model's aggregate change in safety under dialectal reformulation, and Category-Specific Dialect Deviation, which isolates harm categories whose change departs from that aggregate trend. Evaluating models such as Fanar 2, ALLaM 2, and Karnak 1 under multiple safeguard configurations, we find that cross-variety robustness is strongly model dependent, and that aggregate scores can conceal category-level divergence. Our findings highlight the necessity of evaluating Arabic model safety jointly across linguistic varieties and harm domains rather than relying on aggregate scores or MSA alone.