Are Arabic Benchmarks Reliable? QIMMA's Quality-First Approach to LLM Evaluation

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to scale both in size and capabilities, their proficiency in the Arabic Language has seen significant advancement. However, a critical gap remains: the extent of their factual knowledge and cultural sensitivity to the diverse Arabic-speaking world remains largely underexplored. Current evaluation metrics often focus on translation or generic reasoning, failing to capture the rich historical, social, and regional nuances inherent to Arabic culture. In addition, most benchmarks rely on heavy work, with human intervention in some steps, making the evaluation of knowledge coverage expensive and slow. To address this deficiency, we introduce AraDynFact, a novel dynamic evaluation framework designed to rigorously assess the factual Arabic knowledge embedded in LLMs. Unlike static benchmarks, AraDynFact employs a dynamic approach to extract factual information and generate rich and answerable questions in a fast and automatic way. We apply AraDynFact to Arabic Wikipedia and audit the performance of several state-of-the-art models, ranging from Arabic-centric specialized LLMs to high-resource general purpose LLMs. In addition we found a high degree of correlation with existing, hand-crafted Arabic-centric benchmarks, confirming the potential of our dynamic approach.

Arabic large-language-model (LLM) evaluation has matured around Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): aggregated leaderboards such as the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard (OALL), HELM Arabic, and BALSAM rank models across dozens of MSA tasks, and frontier systems increasingly saturate them. Dialectal Arabic, the language Iraqis actually speak, remains nearly invisible to this infrastructure. We introduce Mizan ("the balance"), Iraq's national benchmark for evaluating LLMs on Iraqi Arabic and the Iraqi civic context: an MSA baseline track paired with an Iraqi track across six axes (dialect comprehension, dialect generation, bidirectional MSA-Iraqi translation, Iraq-specific knowledge, official-document field extraction, and safety), built from 340 originally authored, dually reviewed items with statistically audited answer positions and Wilson intervals on every published score. A pilot evaluation of 27 systems, spanning closed frontier models three days after release, open weights across size tiers, and an Arabic trio of commercial, open-specialized, and sovereign systems, yields four findings. The MSA track saturates while the Iraqi track discriminates, with a consistent 14-18-point per-model gap and statistically tied leaders. Official-document extraction confines every system to 32-56. Arabic-focused specialization behaves as MSA specialization: two dedicated Arabic models score below a size-matched generalist on the Iraqi track. And the safety-hardened tier of the newest model family deterministically refuses innocuous dialect-comprehension items as policy violations, an over-refusal mode invisible to MSA benchmarks. The platform enforces an integrity protocol of immutable snapshots, verification certificates, a human publication gate, and public retraction, all exercised during this study. Code and the public development set accompany the paper.

This paper evaluates the performance of twelve Small Language Models (SLMs) on Arabic natural language processing tasks. The study introduces a benchmark of 240 Arabic test items distributed across eight domains and ten language skills, covering both comprehension-oriented and generation-oriented tasks. All models were evaluated under a controlled zero-shot setting using a standardized Arabic-only prompt template. Model responses were assessed through a multi-model LLM-as-a-judge framework involving GPT-4.1 Mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, and DeepSeek-Chat, with scores aggregated across judges and analyzed by task, skill, and model family. The results show that Gemma 3 (12B) achieved the highest overall score (4.548/5), followed by Aya and C4AI Command Arabic. The observed results suggest that model size alone does not explain Arabic SLM performance. Models with stronger Arabic alignment and more reliable instruction-following behavior tended to perform better across tasks. Common failure patterns among lower-performing models include prompt leakage, hallucination, language drift, incomplete generation, and weak task adherence. Overall, the benchmark provides a structured reference for evaluating compact Arabic language models and supports future work on efficient, reliable, and culturally appropriate Arabic AI systems.