Ocean Monjur, Daud Ahmad Nisar, Shahriar Kabir Nahin +4 more

Web agents are typically evaluated on English-language interfaces, leaving their ability to operate across the world's multilingual websites largely unexplored. This gap is especially significant for low-resource languages, where standardized resources for evaluating web agents remain limited. To address this gap, we introduce Low-Resource Web Agent Benchmark (LoWAgent), a benchmark for evaluating web agents across different low-resource languages (LRLs) in comparison to the default, English. LoWAgent evaluates web agents across English and four LRLs: Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, and Amharic. The benchmark comprises of six fully localized websites, instantiated across five languages to yield 3,000 task instances. We evaluate three closed-source and five open-source models across all five languages on all six websites. Our findings show that both closed-source and open-source models experience performance degradation for LRLs compared to English, with substantially greater performance drops observed among the open-source model agents. We further evaluate the robustness of the models on realistic interface disruptions, such as cookie notices and advertisement pop-ups, and find that these further degrade agentic performance. Finally, we show that post-training on a small subset of LoWAgent traces can significantly improve low-resource language agentic task performance, demonstrating the usefulness of our benchmark.

Hasan Demirkiran, Jens Ernstberger

Step-level guards decide, before each tool call, whether an agent's next action is safe given the user's request and the trajectory so far. Users write those requests in many languages, while guard prompts and the benchmarks on which purpose-built guards are trained and evaluated are English. We ask whether a guard's verdict depends on the language of the request. We build LinguaGuardBench from the 1,220 labelled steps of TS-Bench AgentDojo-Traj: we translate only the user instruction into German, French, Turkish, Swahili and Amharic, and keep every tool call, observation and label byte-identical, so any change in a verdict is attributable to language alone. Six English rewordings and a whitespace placebo serve as controls, and managed guards are run three times to measure their noise. Across 19 guards, from frontier APIs to 4B open models and four purpose-built agent guards, most open, small and purpose-built guards change verdicts under translation beyond their own noise floor, and the effect grows with the rarity of the language: among the nine guards below 13B parameters, the mean placebo-adjusted flip rate rises from +1.5 pp on French to +4.4 pp on Amharic. Purpose-built guards are the most sensitive. The direction of the damage tends to follow guard size: open guards of 12-30B parameters block more benign steps (up to +5.0 pp false positives), and every significant loss of recall is in a guard below 10B (up to -7.4 pp). Frontier guards shift by at most about one point; the strongest, Gemini 3.8 Flash, returns identical verdicts with and without the request. The damage is concentrated in a few instructions and, in a post-hoc analysis, falls on steps where the agent's reasoning restates the English request, consistent with guards reacting to inconsistency between channels. English paraphrase moves every guard less than translation does. We release the benchmark and all 489k verdicts.

Emebet Bekele, Fekade Getahun

The predominance of English-language Web content creates an information-access barrier for speakers of low-resource languages such as Amharic. This paper presents the design, imple-mentation, and evaluation of a bidirectional Amharic-English cross-language question answering (CLQA) system that allows a user to formulate a natural-language question in either Amharic or English and retrieve an answer from documents written in the other language. The system integrates a statistical machine translation (SMT) component for query translation, a maximum-entropy named entity recognition (NER) component for Amharic text processing, semantic-based indexing, question analysis, passage retrieval, and answer extraction. A domain-diverse Amharic-English parallel corpus was used to train the SMT component, while monolingual cor-pora supported language modeling. Documents were normalized, tokenized, stemmed, indexed, and semantically enriched before retrieval. The original evaluation used precision and recall as the principal effectiveness measures. For Amharic-to-English retrieval, the system achieved 72% precision and 79% recall; for English-to-Amharic retrieval, it achieved 65% precision and 70% recall. These findings show that a modular translation-and-retrieval architecture can provide useful cross-language access even under low-resource conditions. This revised article preserves the original experimental claims while situating them in the context of subsequent multilingual transformer and Amharic QA research.

Sunday Afariogun, Odunolaoluwa Jenrola, Zeinab Nezami

The Offline AI Modules workstream enables practical, low-power, and community-accessible deployment of voice-first AI systems that operate fully offline. Designed for African language communities where speech is the dominant mode of interaction and internet connectivity is unreliable or absent, the workstream delivers three reinforcing components: a modular voice-first offline architecture, a low-cost hardware reference bill of materials, and a reproducible quantization and a reproducible quantization and benchmarking pipeline for instruction-tuned language models in the 2-5B parameter class. This paper presents the first end-to-end benchmark evaluation of the stack across two hardware tiers: an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX (TierB) and a Raspberry Pi5 (TierA). Three instruction-tuned models are evaluated across four quantization formats, assessed for deployment metrics (decode throughput, chat latency, memory, power) and multilingual quality (topic classification accuracy on MasakhaNEWS across English, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin, and Yoruba; per-language perplexity drift). Speech recognition is evaluated using Ethio-ASR on Amharic and Oromo across both tiers. The principal finding is that Q4_K_M quantization represents the best size-to-quality trade-off for deployment on both tiers: gemma-4-E2B-it achieves 28.8t/s decode throughput and 89.2% topic classification accuracy at Q4_K_M on TierB, while all three models run within the 16GB memory budget on TierA.

Bhanu Prakash Vangala, Sowmya Guda, Navya Vangala

Every text classifier for an African language begins with a budgeting question: how many labelled examples are needed, and can labels from other African languages stand in for them? We answer both questions empirically for 28 language-task pairs, news topic classification in 16 languages (MasakhaNEWS) and tweet sentiment in 12 languages (AfriSenti), using a character n-gram linear model that trains in seconds on two CPU cores with no pretrained weights and no accelerator. Monolingual learning curves at budgets from 25 to several thousand labels show that topic classification reaches 90\% of its full-data macro-F1 with about 400 labels in the median language, while sentiment is still improving at the full training size in 11 of 12 languages and needs thousands of labels. Pooling the full training data of the other languages in the benchmark is worth a great deal at small budgets and nothing at large ones: at 25 target labels it adds 0.20 macro-F1 on average for news (up to 0.43 for Lingala) and 0.08 for sentiment, the gain decays to zero by 800 labels, and at full size pooling hurts in 9 of 16 and 8 of 12 languages. Twenty-five target labels plus pooled data match what 100 to 400 monolingual labels achieve for most news languages. A complete zero-shot transfer matrix shows that transfer without any target labels recovers a median of only 13\% (news) and 4\% (sentiment) of the gap between a majority-class predictor and the in-language model, with the exceptions explained by shared script (Amharic and Tigrinya), shared lexicon (English and Nigerian Pidgin, the Arabic dialects), or a shared label prior rather than by language family. We release code that regenerates every number from the public benchmark files and translate the results into concrete annotation guidance for teams building African-language classifiers without GPUs.

Abigail Oppong, P Sam Sahil, Tadesse Destaw Belay +12 more

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is largely developed in English, assuming these safeguards generalize across multilingual settings. However, this assumption remains underexplored and exposes a vulnerability in low-resource languages. We investigate cross-lingual safety transfer in four African languages, Twi, Hausa, Amharic, and Swahili, using LoDNA, a new safety dataset that pairs literal translations with culturally localized prompts. To move beyond generation-based evaluation, we propose a latent geometric framework that probes hidden-state refusal representations in LLMs. Our experimental results show that cross-lingual safety transfer is severely limited; harmful prompts retain less than 10% of the English refusal signal across most language-model pairs. Literal and localized prompts are semantically aligned (cosine 0.95-0.996) but drift across layers, suggesting models encode the concepts without routing them to safety mechanisms. These findings demonstrate that current multilingual safety alignment is superficial, providing strong evidence against the assumption of a universal, language-agnostic harm manifold within the specific low-resource languages studied. Warning: This paper contains example data that may be offensive or harmful.

Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Alvin Grissom

Multilingual reasoning evaluation overwhelmingly relies on translating English benchmarks, a practice that introduces linguistic artifacts and fails to test culturally-grounded reasoning. We introduce ADAGE (Analogical Difficulty-by-design Assessment for Grounded Evaluation), a language-agnostic pipeline that combines native-speaker curation with LLM-assisted generation to construct challenging, translation-free benchmarks for abstract analogical reasoning. We validate ADAGE by constructing benchmarks for Arabic, Amharic, and Japanese. Evaluating 14 open-weight models, we find a consistent cultural reasoning gap: models that perform well on English proverb reasoning struggle substantially on all three native benchmarks, with accuracy dropping by 12--52 percentage points relative to English. We release the pipeline, all three benchmarks, and the full evaluation suite.

Olaoye Anthony Somide

Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token. Yet tokenizers assign more subword tokens to the same meaning in some languages than in others, so speakers of languages with high token-fertility pay a structural penalty before a model is ever invoked. This penalty is documented for multilingual settings in general, but it has not been measured systematically for African languages at the level of enterprise deployment economics and cognitive context capacity. We measure it across 20 African languages spanning five language families and three scripts (Latin, Ge'ez/Ethiopic, N'Ko; 19 appear in the primary FLORES-200+ corpus, with Nigerian Pidgin measured via MAFAND-MT only), using parallel corpora so that the language effect is isolated from content. Across 11 frontier and open tokenizers on FLORES-200+, every African language carries a tokenization premium above English (median 1.88x on GPT-5 / o200k_base, up to 8.92x for N'Ko); the penalty is largest for Ethiopic and N'Ko scripts (reaching 7-9x) and is near-invariant across corpora (FLORES vs SIB-200 Pearson r = 0.9998). Translated into deployment terms, this results in up to 8.9x inference cost and an equivalent generation-latency multiplier (N'Ko vs English on GPT-5; 7.4x for Amharic), and as little as 11% of English's effective context window. The best currently available tokenizer for African languages, Gemma 4, reduces the mean premium from 3.31x (cl100k_base) to 2.38x, but no tokenizer eliminates the penalty. We release an open measurement tool (afri-fertility), a public leaderboard, a results dataset, and mitigation guidance for African builders. The penalty falls hardest on the languages whose speakers can least afford it, a digital divide encoded directly into the subword vocabulary.