Basma El Amel Boussaha

Quentin Malartic, Nilabhra Roy Chowdhury, Ruxandra Cojocaru et al.

We introduce Falcon2-11B, a foundation model trained on over five trillion tokens, and its multimodal counterpart, Falcon2-11B-vlm, which is a vision-to-text model. We report our findings during the training of the Falcon2-11B which follows a multi-stage approach where the early stages are distinguished by their context length and a final stage where we use a curated, high-quality dataset. Additionally, we report the effect of doubling the batch size mid-training and how training loss spikes are affected by the learning rate. The downstream performance of the foundation model is evaluated on established benchmarks, including multilingual and code datasets. The foundation model shows strong generalization across all the tasks which makes it suitable for downstream finetuning use cases. For the vision language model, we report the performance on several benchmarks and show that our model achieves a higher average score compared to open-source models of similar size. The model weights and code of both Falcon2-11B and Falcon2-11B-vlm are made available under a permissive license.

Leen AlQadi, Ahmed Alzubaidi, Mohammed Alyafeai et al.

We present QIMMA, a quality-assured Arabic LLM leaderboard that places systematic benchmark validation at its core. Rather than aggregating existing resources as-is, QIMMA applies a multi-model assessment pipeline combining automated LLM judgment with human review to surface and resolve systematic quality issues in well-established Arabic benchmarks before evaluation. The result is a curated, multi-domain, multi-task evaluation suite of over 52k samples, grounded predominantly in native Arabic content; code evaluation tasks are the sole exception, as they are inherently language-agnostic. Transparent implementation via LightEval, EvalPlus and public release of per-sample inference outputs make QIMMA a reproducible and community-extensible foundation for Arabic NLP evaluation.

Basma El Amel Boussaha, Leen AlQadi, Mugariya Farooq et al.

Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, yet efforts to develop and evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for Arabic remain relatively limited. Most existing Arabic benchmarks focus on linguistic, cultural, or religious content, leaving a significant gap in domains like STEM and code which are increasingly relevant for real-world LLM applications. To help bridge this gap, we present 3LM, a suite of three benchmarks designed specifically for Arabic. The first is a set of STEM-related question-answer pairs, naturally sourced from Arabic textbooks and educational worksheets. The second consists of synthetically generated STEM questions, created using the same sources. The third benchmark focuses on code generation, built through a careful translation of two widely used code benchmarks, incorporating a human-in-the-loop process with several rounds of review to ensure high-quality and faithful translations. We release all three benchmarks publicly to support the growth of Arabic LLM research in these essential but underrepresented areas.

Ahmed Alzubaidi, Shaikha Alsuwaidi, Basma El Amel Boussaha et al.

This survey provides the first systematic review of Arabic LLM benchmarks, analyzing 40+ evaluation benchmarks across NLP tasks, knowledge domains, cultural understanding, and specialized capabilities. We propose a taxonomy organizing benchmarks into four categories: Knowledge, NLP Tasks, Culture and Dialects, and Target-Specific evaluations. Our analysis reveals significant progress in benchmark diversity while identifying critical gaps: limited temporal evaluation, insufficient multi-turn dialogue assessment, and cultural misalignment in translated datasets. We examine three primary approaches: native collection, translation, and synthetic generation discussing their trade-offs regarding authenticity, scale, and cost. This work serves as a comprehensive reference for Arabic NLP researchers, providing insights into benchmark methodologies, reproducibility standards, and evaluation metrics while offering recommendations for future development.

Mouadh Yagoubi, Yasser Dahou, Billel Mokeddem et al.

Existing benchmarks have proven effective for assessing the performance of fully trained large language models. However, we find striking differences in the early training stages of small models, where benchmarks often fail to provide meaningful or discriminative signals. To explore how these differences arise, this competition tackles the challenge of designing scientific knowledge evaluation tasks specifically tailored for measuring early training progress of language models. Participants are invited to develop novel evaluation methodologies or adapt existing benchmarks to better capture performance differences among language models. To support this effort, we provide three pre-trained small models (0.5B, 1B, and 3B parameters), along with intermediate checkpoints sampled during training up to 200B tokens. All experiments and development work can be run on widely available free cloud-based GPU platforms, making participation accessible to researchers with limited computational resources. Submissions will be evaluated based on three criteria: the quality of the performance signal they produce, the consistency of model rankings at 1 trillion tokens of training, and their relevance to the scientific knowledge domain. By promoting the design of tailored evaluation strategies for early training, this competition aims to attract a broad range of participants from various disciplines, including those who may not be machine learning experts or have access to dedicated GPU resources. Ultimately, this initiative seeks to make foundational LLM research more systematic and benchmark-informed from the earliest phases of model development.

Basma El Amel Boussaha, Nicolas Hernandez, Christine Jacquin et al.

Building dialogue systems that naturally converse with humans is being an attractive and an active research domain. Multiple systems are being designed everyday and several datasets are being available. For this reason, it is being hard to keep an up-to-date state-of-the-art. In this work, we present the latest and most relevant retrieval-based dialogue systems and the available datasets used to build and evaluate them. We discuss their limitations and provide insights and guidelines for future work.

Dat Tien Nguyen, Shafiq Joty, Basma El Amel Boussaha et al.

Discussion forums are an important source of information. They are often used to answer specific questions a user might have and to discover more about a topic of interest. Discussions in these forums may evolve in intricate ways, making it difficult for users to follow the flow of ideas. We propose a novel approach for automatically identifying the underlying thread structure of a forum discussion. Our approach is based on a neural model that computes coherence scores of possible reconstructions and then selects the highest scoring, i.e., the most coherent one. Preliminary experiments demonstrate promising results outperforming a number of strong baseline methods.