Organizations: ETIS (UMR 8051), CY Cergy Paris Univ., ENSEA, CNRS, France · Computer Engineering Dept, Sana’a Community College, Yemen · VSC Laboratory, Department of Electronics and Automation, University of Biskra, Algeria · Dept. of CS & AI, Univ. of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain · CNR-ISASI "E. Caianiello", Lecce, Italy
Islamic inheritance (Ilm al-Mawarith) is a multi-stage legal reasoning task requiring the identification of eligible heirs, resolution of blocking rules (hajb), assignment of fixed and residual shares, handling of adjustments such as awl and radd, and generation of a consistent final distribution. The task is further complicated by variations across legal schools and civil-law codifications, requiring models to operate under explicit legal configurations. We present a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline for this setting, combining rule-grounded synthetic data generation, hybrid retrieval (dense and BM25) with cross-encoder reranking, and schema-constrained output validation. A symbolic inheritance calculator is used to generate a large high-quality synthetic corpus with full intermediate reasoning traces, ensuring legal and numerical consistency. The proposed system achieves a MIR-E score of 0.935 and ranks first on the official QIAS 2026 blind-test leaderboard. Results demonstrate that retrieval-grounded, schema-aware generation significantly improves reliability in high-precision Arabic legal reasoning tasks.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the proposed RAG pipeline for QIAS.
Category
Train
Dev
Diff
Simple
5,531 (93.8%)
125 (62.5%)
-31.3%
‘Awl
288 (4.9%)
4 (2.0%)
-2.9%
Radd
81 (1.4%)
71 (35.5%)
+34.1%
Total
5,900
200
–
Table 1: QIAS 2026 dataset distribution showing train–dev imbalance.
Model
MIR-E
Missing
Qwen 3.5 9B
0.347
19
Qwen2.5-7B
0.243
0
Command-R7B
0.225
32
Llama3.2-1B
0.109
80
Gemma3-12B
0.010
193
Table 2: Off-the-shelf benchmarking on the 200-case QIAS dev set.
Rank
Team
MIR-E
1
CVPD (ours)
0.935
2
Simplicity Almansour (2026)
0.931
3
KMS Alkhamis (2026)
0.916
4
QU-NLP *
0.907
5
PSL Mouhoub (2026)
0.898
6
grkurdi *
0.826
Table 3: Official QIAS 2026 blind-test leaderboard. Teams marked with * did not have published system descriptions at the time of writing.
Source
Combined
Semantic
Keyword
PDF-only
0.718
0.879
0.235
PDF+Web
0.591
0.746
0.229
Web-only
0.463
0.593
0.269
Table 4: Source ablation on the 200-question QIAS dev set.
Islamic inheritance law is challenging for large language models because solving inheritance cases requires complex, structured, multi-step reasoning and the correct application of juristic rules to compute heirs' shares. We introduce MAWARITH, a large-scale annotated dataset of 12,500 Arabic inheritance cases for training and evaluating models on the full reasoning chain: (i) identifying eligible heirs, (ii) applying blocking (\d{h}ajb) and allocation rules, and (iii) computing exact inheritance shares. To the best of our knowledge, MAWARITH is the first Arabic corpus and benchmark designed for end-to-end Islamic inheritance reasoning. Unlike prior datasets that restrict inheritance case solving to multiple-choice questions, MAWARITH supports the full reasoning chain and provides step-by-step solutions with justifications grounded in classical juristic sources and established inheritance rules, as well as exact share calculations. This enables models to learn how to generate detailed, step-by-step responses to user queries that reflect real-world Islamic inheritance cases. To evaluate models beyond final-answer accuracy, we propose MIR-E (Mawarith Inheritance Reasoning Evaluation), a weighted multi-stage metric that scores key reasoning stages and captures error propagation across the pipeline. We evaluate six large language models in a zero-shot setting. A commercial model achieves about 90%, whereas all evaluated open-source models remain below 50%. Our error analysis identifies recurring failure patterns, including scenario misinterpretation, errors in heir identification, errors in share allocation, and missing or incorrect application of key inheritance rules such as \textquotesingle awl and radd. The MAWARITH dataset is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/nlpresearcher/mawarith.
This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the QIAS 2026 shared task, organized as part of the OSACT7 Workshop and co-located with LREC 2026. The shared task was designed to evaluate the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning in the religious and legal domain of Islamic inheritance. Unlike conventional question-answering benchmarks, QIAS 2026 focuses on end-to-end reasoning from natural language cases, requiring systems to perform the full inheritance calculation process, from identifying the eligible heirs to assigning the correct share to each beneficiary. To support this evaluation, the task was based on the MAWARITH benchmark, a dataset of 12,500 Arabic inheritance cases annotated with intermediate reasoning steps and final answers. System submissions were evaluated using MIR-E, a multi-step metric that measures performance across the main stages of inheritance reasoning. A total of 16 teams participated in the shared task, investigating a range of approaches, including prompting-based methods, retrieval-augmented generation, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that Islamic inheritance remains a highly challenging benchmark for current language models, especially in stages that require precise legal interpretation and structured numerical reasoning. This overview summarizes the task design, dataset, evaluation framework, participating systems, and main results.
Islamic inheritance law (ilm al-mawarıth) presents a challenging domain for evaluating large language models' structured reasoning capabilities, requiring multi-step legal analysis, rule-based blocking decisions, and precise fractional calculations. We present QU-NLP's submission to the QIAS 2026 shared task on Arabic Islamic inheritance reasoning. Our approach employs a multi-stage Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning strategy on Qwen3-4B: (1) domain adaptation on 3,166 Islamic fatwa records to acquire inheritance terminology and jurisprudential reasoning patterns, followed by (2) task-specific training on 12,000 structured inheritance cases to optimize JSON-formatted output generation. Using 4-bit NF4 quantization with rank-128 LoRA adapters, our model achieves 90% MIR-E (Mawarith Inheritance Reasoning Evaluation) score on the test set, demonstrating competitive performance while requiring minimal computational resources. Our results show that domain-specific pre-adaptation combined with structured output training enables small language models to perform complex legal reasoning tasks effectively comparing to commercial systems such as Gemini-2.5-flash.