Nuha-Speech: Building General-Purpose Arabic Speech-LLMs

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. We present a controlled study of multi-task instruction tuning for an Arabic-centric audio LLM across generative tasks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech and text summarization, as well as discriminative tasks, including dialect identification (DID) and speech emotion recognition (SER), in a resource-constrained setting. To support end-to-end Arabic speech summarization, we introduce AraMega-SSum, the first Arabic speech summarization dataset designed for training and benchmarking Arabic-centric audio LLMs. We compare four training strategies: (i) Uniform Mixing (UM), (ii) Task-Progressive Curriculum (TPC), (iii) Aligner-Based Diverse Sampling (ADS) for training-time batch construction, and (iv) a two-stage TPC->ADS strategy. Our results reveal a clear efficiency-robustness trade-off. TPC achieves the strongest performance on generative tasks, including ASR and summarization. ADS improves paralinguistic tasks but reduces generative stability when used alone. The two-stage TPC->ADS strategy provides the best overall balance, achieving the strongest DID and SER performance while outperforming large proprietary models such as Gemini-2.5-Pro on discriminative tasks. We will publicly release AraMega-SSum together with all experimental resources to support future research in Arabic speech understanding.

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.

NADI 2026 is the seventh edition of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task series and the second dedicated to multidialectal Arabic speech processing. This edition comprises five tasks and eight subtasks spanning Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Dialect Identification (SDID), Text-to-Speech (TTS), Spoken Language Translation (SLT), and Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). NADI 2026 emphasizes realistic evaluation through low-bandwidth, mixed-dialect, code-switched, out-of-domain, and zero-shot settings, while introducing TTS, SLT, and SLU to the series for the first time. The shared task attracted 21 participating teams from at least 13 countries, with 48 test-phase submissions and 14 submitted system-description papers. Results show that out-of-domain generalization remains a major bottleneck and highlight the effectiveness of recent Arabic-specialized speech models, multimodal dialect identification approaches, and ensemble methods. Overall, NADI 2026 provides a broader and more challenging benchmark for robust Arabic dialect speech processing.