Abdelaziz Bounhar
Author directory2026
Jais 2: A Family of Arabic-Centric Open Large Language Models
Mohamed Anwar | Abed Alhakim Freihat | George Ibrahim | Mostafa Awad | Abdelrahman Sadallah | Gurpreet Gosal | Gokulakrishnan Ramakrishnan | Sarath Chandran | Biswajit Mishra | Rituraj Joshi | Ahmed Frikha | Etienne Goffinet | Abhishek Maiti | Ali El Filali | Sarah AlBarri | Samujjwal Ghosh | Rahul Pal | Parvez Mullah | Awantika Shukla | Sajid Siddiki | Samta Kamboj | Onkar Pandit | Sunil Kumar Sahu | AbdelRahman Elbadawy | Amr Mohamed | Ahmad Chamma | Evan Dufraisse | Abdelaziz Bounhar | Dani Bouch | Hadi Abdine | Guokan Shang | Fajri Koto | Yuxia Wang | Zhuohan Xie | Ali Mekky | Rania Elbadry | Sarfraz Ahmad | Momina Ahsan | Omar El Herraoui | Daniil Orel | Hasan Iqbal | Kareem Elzeky | Mervat Abassy | Kareem Elozeiri | Saadeldine Eletter | Farah Atif | Nurdaulet Mukhituly | Haonan Li | Xudong Han | Aaryamonvikram Singh | Zainul Abedien Ahmed Quraishi | Neha Sengupta | Larry Murray | Avraham Sheinin | Joel Hestness | Natalia Vassilieva | Hector Xuguang Ren | Zhengzhong Liu | Michalis Vazirgiannis | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mohamed Anwar | Abed Alhakim Freihat | George Ibrahim | Mostafa Awad | Abdelrahman Sadallah | Gurpreet Gosal | Gokulakrishnan Ramakrishnan | Sarath Chandran | Biswajit Mishra | Rituraj Joshi | Ahmed Frikha | Etienne Goffinet | Abhishek Maiti | Ali El Filali | Sarah AlBarri | Samujjwal Ghosh | Rahul Pal | Parvez Mullah | Awantika Shukla | Sajid Siddiki | Samta Kamboj | Onkar Pandit | Sunil Kumar Sahu | AbdelRahman Elbadawy | Amr Mohamed | Ahmad Chamma | Evan Dufraisse | Abdelaziz Bounhar | Dani Bouch | Hadi Abdine | Guokan Shang | Fajri Koto | Yuxia Wang | Zhuohan Xie | Ali Mekky | Rania Elbadry | Sarfraz Ahmad | Momina Ahsan | Omar El Herraoui | Daniil Orel | Hasan Iqbal | Kareem Elzeky | Mervat Abassy | Kareem Elozeiri | Saadeldine Eletter | Farah Atif | Nurdaulet Mukhituly | Haonan Li | Xudong Han | Aaryamonvikram Singh | Zainul Abedien Ahmed Quraishi | Neha Sengupta | Larry Murray | Avraham Sheinin | Joel Hestness | Natalia Vassilieva | Hector Xuguang Ren | Zhengzhong Liu | Michalis Vazirgiannis | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jais 2 is a family of open-weight, Arabic-centric large language models designed for strong Arabic performance and broad cultural coverage. The family includes, to our knowledge, the largest open Arabic-centric LLM trained from scratch, with 70B parameters, alongside an efficient 8B model. A custom Arabic-centric vocabulary supports efficient training and inference, while an optimized architecture and training recipe improve compute efficiency. Jais 2 achieves the highest scores on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard v2 (OALL2) and AraGen v1 among the evaluated open models, while remaining competitive on English benchmarks. It also obtains strong results in Arabic poetry, dream interpretation, translation, and summarization. On the IslamicQA domain, Jais 2-70B achieves the second-highest overall average among the evaluated large open models, while attaining the highest scores on PalmX and the held-out in-house IslamicQA benchmark. We release both model sizes as open-weights on Hugging Face under a commercially permissive license. Jais 2-70B is also available as a chat application on the Web, iOS, and Android, reaching inference speeds of up to 2,000 tokens per second on Cerebras hardware.
2025
Nile-Chat: Egyptian Language Models for Arabic and Latin Scripts
Guokan Shang | Hadi Abdine | Ahmad Chamma | Amr Mohamed | Mohamed Anwar | Abdelaziz Bounhar | Omar El Herraoui | Preslav Nakov | Michalis Vazirgiannis | Eric P. Xing
Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
Guokan Shang | Hadi Abdine | Ahmad Chamma | Amr Mohamed | Mohamed Anwar | Abdelaziz Bounhar | Omar El Herraoui | Preslav Nakov | Michalis Vazirgiannis | Eric P. Xing
Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
We introduce Nile-Chat-4B, 3x4B-A6B, and 12B, a collection of LLMs for Egyptian dialect, uniquely designed to understand and generate texts written in both Arabic and Latin scripts. Specifically, with Nile-Chat-3x4B-A6B, we introduce a novel language adaptation approach by leveraging the Branch-Train-MiX strategy to merge script-specialized experts, into a single MoE model. Our Nile-Chat models significantly outperform leading multilingual and Arabic LLMs, such as LLaMa, Jais, and ALLaM, on our newly introduced Egyptian evaluation benchmarks, which span both understanding and generative tasks. Notably, our 12B model delivers a 14.4% performance gain over Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on Latin-script benchmarks. All our resources are publicly available. We believe this work presents a comprehensive methodology for adapting LLMs to a single language with dual-script usage, addressing an often overlooked aspect in contemporary LLM development.
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Co-authors
- Hadi Abdine 2
- Mohamed Anwar 2
- Ahmad Chamma 2
- Omar El Herraoui 2
- Amr Mohamed 2
- Preslav Nakov 2
- Guokan Shang 2
- Michalis Vazirgiannis 2
- Mervat Abassy 1
- Sarfraz Ahmad 1
- Momina Ahsan 1
- Sarah AlBarri 1
- Farah Atif 1
- Mostafa Awad 1
- Dani Bouch 1
- Sarath Chandran 1
- Evan Dufraisse 1
- Ali El Filali 1
- AbdelRahman Elbadawy 1
- Rania Elbadry 1
- Saadeldine Eletter 1
- Kareem Elozeiri 1
- Kareem Elzeky 1
- Abed Alhakim Freihat 1
- Ahmed Frikha 1
- Samujjwal Ghosh 1
- Etienne Goffinet 1
- Gurpreet Gosal 1
- Xudong Han 1
- Joel Hestness 1
- George Ibrahim 1
- Hasan Iqbal 1
- Rituraj Joshi 1
- Samta Kamboj 1
- Fajri Koto 1
- Haonan Li 1
- Zhengzhong Liu 1
- Abhishek Maiti 1
- Ali Mekky 1
- Biswajit Mishra 1
- Nurdaulet Mukhituly 1
- Parvez Mullah 1
- Larry Murray 1
- Daniil Orel 1
- Rahul Pal 1
- Onkar Arun Pandit 1
- Zainul Abedien Ahmed Quraishi 1
- Gokulakrishnan Ramakrishnan 1
- Hector Xuguang Ren 1
- Abdelrahman Sadallah 1
- Sunil Kumar Sahu 1
- Neha Sengupta 1
- Avraham Sheinin 1
- Awantika Shukla 1
- Sajid Siddiki 1
- Aaryamonvikram Singh 1
- Natalia Vassilieva 1
- Yuxia Wang 1
- Zhuohan Xie 1
- Eric Xing 1