Saidzoda-Tajik-LFM-2.6B: Adapting a 2.6B Hybrid Model to Tajik Tool Calling, and What Continued Pretraining Takes Away

Finding the passage that answers a question is the first step of most practical systems built on documents, and for Tajik we found no openly described model for it. We present Saidzoda-Tajik-E5-Large, a Tajik text embedder built from multilingual-e5-large-instruct (560M parameters). We asked our own Tajik language model to write questions for passages from Tajik laws, tax documents, Wikipedia and web text, and trained on 235,140 question and passage pairs for one epoch, with hard negatives chosen by another embedder and English and Russian pairs mixed in so the model would not forget those languages. On laws the model had never seen, the right passage is among the top ten results for 93.6% of questions, up from 80.2%; on tax documents, 94.5% against 82.6%. On Belebele, the one test we have that was written by people, the gain is smaller and not confirmed (92.2% to 95.2%, with touching intervals), and Russian and English do not change. On law and tax questions written in the same style as its training questions, it is tied with Giga-Embeddings-3B, a model five times its size; on Belebele the 3B and 8B models score slightly higher, and only after we fine-tuned them on our data are they clearly ahead. We also report what failed: training in bfloat16 broke the model, and replacing Tajik letters with similar Russian ones did not help. Our law, tax and Wikipedia test questions come from the same model that wrote the training questions, so we treat those scores as an upper limit until questions written by Tajik speakers are available.

We present Soro, a family of Tajik-specialized conversational large language models (LLMs) designed for real-world deployment under tight compute and connectivity constraints in Tajikistan. Starting from open-weight Gemma 3 checkpoints, we perform Tajik-only continual pretraining on a curated 1.9-billion-token corpus spanning filtered web text, PDF documents, and curriculum-aligned educational materials, followed by supervised instruction tuning on 40K Tajik teacher-style examples. To enable rigorous evaluation despite the limited coverage of Tajik in standard benchmarks, we introduce a suite of Tajik benchmarks covering general knowledge, linguistic competence, and school- and university entrance-exam domains, and we open-source them on Hugging Face. Across these Tajik benchmarks, Soro substantially outperforms same-size Gemma 3 baselines while retaining strong English performance on standard datasets. We further show that FP8 and INT4 quantization of Soro preserves most Tajik-language gains while reducing memory requirements for edge deployment, supporting an ongoing education-sector pilot and planned scale-out across schools in Tajikistan.

Kazakh, a Turkic language spoken by over 22 million people, remains underserved by existing multilingual language models, which allocate minimal capacity to low-resource languages and employ tokenizers ill-suited to agglutinative morphology. We present SozKZ, a family of Llama-architecture language models (50M-600M parameters) trained entirely from scratch on 9 billion tokens of Kazakh text with a dedicated 50K BPE tokenizer. We evaluate all models on three Kazakh benchmarks -- multiple-choice cultural QA, reading comprehension (Belebele), and topic classification (SIB-200) -- alongside five multilingual baselines ranging from 500M to 3B parameters. Our 600M model achieves 30.3% accuracy on Kazakh cultural QA, approaching the 32.0% of Llama-3.2-1B (2x larger), and 25.5% on SIB-200 topic classification, surpassing all evaluated multilingual models up to 2B parameters. We observe consistent scaling from 50M to 600M, with MC QA accuracy rising from 22.8% to 30.3%, suggesting that further scaling remains beneficial. These results demonstrate that small, dedicated models trained from scratch with a language-appropriate tokenizer offer a viable path for low-resource language technology, achieving competitive performance at a fraction of the computational cost. All models and the tokenizer are released under open licenses.