arXiv:2608. 13580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jais 2 is a family of Arabic-centric large language models developed jointly by MBZUAI, Cerebras, and Inception, designed to advance Arabic-centric language modeling, with strong performance across the Arabic and culturally grounded benchmarks evaluated in this report.
arXiv:2608. 15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language-specific competency (LSC) is the phenomenon of a language model performing better or worse depending on the language of the prompt.
Nuha‑Speech is a new initiative aimed at creating general‑purpose Arabic speech‑large language models (speech‑LLMs). It includes the construction of a large Arabic Speech Question‑Answering corpus with over 1.5 million samples for instruction tuning, supervised fine‑tuning of Qwen‑Omni model variants at various scales, and a systematic evaluation framework with diverse tasks and tailored metrics. The project seeks to establish foundational infrastructure for Arabic speech‑LLMs amid limited Arabic speech resources.
The study investigates how exposing large language models to Arabic translations of English benchmark tasks can hide data contamination from standard English-only detection methods. By testing four instruction-tuned models with increasing Arabic exposure, the authors find that traditional probes like TS-Guessing and Min-K%++ fail to detect contamination, yet English performance still improves. They propose a new Translation-Aware Contamination Detection (TACD) method that uses cross-lingual consistency and choice reordering to reveal contamination effects that are otherwise invisible to English-only diagnostics.
arXiv:2601. 12494v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio large language models (LLMs) enable unified speech understanding and generation, but adapting them to linguistically complex and dialect-rich settings such as Arabic-English remains challenging.
The paper proposes a multilingual adaptation of an English quality classifier to select high‑quality training data for large language model pretraining across more than 100 languages. The method trains a small multi‑layer perceptron on Transformer embeddings, using machine‑translated text scored by the English classifier as labels. Experiments on 1B, 3B, and 8B parameter models show that the adapted classifier preserves benchmark performance and regional knowledge, and it generalizes to unseen languages by learning the original scoring criteria.
Mimir is a 1.78‑B parameter language model built on the Hierarchical Reasoning Model Text (HRM‑Text) architecture, which interleaves low‑level and high‑level transformer stacks. It is trained from scratch on a curated mix of 161 instruction, reasoning, tool‑use, multilingual, and synthetic datasets totaling 70.5 B tokens per epoch (103 B for the continued‑training version Mimir v1.5), using only data that meets permissibility criteria. Across 20 benchmarks in English, Danish, and Math & Code, Mimir v1.5 outperforms all other sub‑2 B models and matches or exceeds the performance of larger 9 B‑parameter models, while memorisation audits show low risk and inference‑time ablations reveal graceful degradation when adjusting low‑level stack applications.
arXiv:2608.00207v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform strongly in English medical tasks but degrade substantially in Arabic, a gap widely attributed to limited trai...
arXiv:2607.00890v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synth...
arXiv:2607. 20056v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) in Arabic must recover both explicitly stated aspects and implicit aspects that are never named in the text.
arXiv:2608.12018v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at cross-lingual tasks but often fail to capture intra-lingual morphologica...
The paper introduces MAPLE, a family of decoder‑only language models pretrained with document‑level geographic metadata such as source URL, country, and continent. MAPLE is evaluated on a new benchmark, LocalNewsQA, which tests whether models can switch answers when the locale changes. Experiments show that, with inference‑time metadata fixed, MAPLE outperforms metadata‑free controls in both answer switching and accuracy on locale‑dependent questions, and these gains grow with model size.