Ahmed Heakl
Author directory2026
Right Frame, Wrong Rule: Cultural Cues Expose the Financial Knowledge Gap They Were Meant to Close
Rania Elbadry | Ahmed Heakl | Saeed Almheiri | Fan Zhang | Muhra AlMahri | Xueqing Peng | Mohsinul Kabir | Shuyao Wang | Yi Han | Saadeldine Eletter | Duzhen Zhang | Preslav Nakov | Yuxia Wang | Fajri Koto | Zhuohan Xie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Rania Elbadry | Ahmed Heakl | Saeed Almheiri | Fan Zhang | Muhra AlMahri | Xueqing Peng | Mohsinul Kabir | Shuyao Wang | Yi Han | Saadeldine Eletter | Duzhen Zhang | Preslav Nakov | Yuxia Wang | Fajri Koto | Zhuohan Xie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
When multiple normative frameworks yield equally valid answers, which framework should a language model select, and can it answer correctly within it? We formalize this as normative pluralism and study it in Islamic finance with a four-choice taxonomy that decomposes framework selection from within-framework correctness. The decomposition exposes a failure mode invisible to two-choice instruments, the stereotype trap: a model leans toward the culturally appropriate framework but produces factually wrong answers within it. Across twelve models, two languages, and fifty demographic signals, cultural cues redirect framework selection at severe cost: redirection and correctness are inversely coupled (r=−0.89 Arabic, r=−0.81 English). Under the strongest signal, large open-weight models reach 97% Islamic-frame selection, a result two-choice instruments would report as near-perfect alignment, yet 57-66% of those responses misquote the Islamic rule. We argue that cultural default bias is competence-conditioned routing: models default to the framework where they are most accurate, and the cues prescribed as mitigation expose the competence gap they were meant to correct.
MedRoundsQA: A Persona and Difficulty Aware Evaluation for Multi-Turn Medical Consultations
Youssef Mohamed | Ahmed Heakl | Qinrong Cui | Junhong Liang | Rafiq Ali | Bdour Babillie | Nazira Dunbayeva | Lang Gao | Omar Hussein | Ahmed Nada | Ahmed Mohamed Magdy Mohamed | Jinghui Liu | Salman Khan | Imran Razzak | Yuxia Wang | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Youssef Mohamed | Ahmed Heakl | Qinrong Cui | Junhong Liang | Rafiq Ali | Bdour Babillie | Nazira Dunbayeva | Lang Gao | Omar Hussein | Ahmed Nada | Ahmed Mohamed Magdy Mohamed | Jinghui Liu | Salman Khan | Imran Razzak | Yuxia Wang | Xiuying Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Medical benchmarks are dominated by single-turn, multiple-choice clinical cases that poorly reflect real consultations. Practically, clinicians elicit evidence interactively, and patient communication varies widely. We introduce MEDROUNDSQA, a multi-turn diagnostic benchmark derived from 1,387 clinical cases across 17 specialties. Each case is converted into a structured 24-slot clinical record and then instantiated as controlled doctor–patient dual-agent dialogues under varying patient personas, with the underlying clinical content held fixed. We further classify cases by difficulty using model-based uncertainty to enable easy-to-hard analysis. Evaluations of fifteen LLM doctor agents show that (i) moving from a single-turn diagnosis on the standardized records to multi-turn consultations causes large degradations of roughly 13–39 points; (ii) more turns reliably improve question relevance, but diagnostic accuracy exhibits diminishing returns and typically plateaus after 6–12 turns; and (iii) patient persona differences can shift diagnosis accuracy by about 7–8 points from the lowest to highest education levels, highlighting equity risks that single-turn benchmarks miss.
SAHM: A Benchmark for Arabic Financial and Shari’ah-Compliant Reasoning
Rania Elbadry | Sarfraz Ahmad | Ahmed Heakl | Dani Bouch | Momina Ahsan | Muhra AlMahri | Marwa Elsaid Khalil | Yuxia Wang | Salem Lahlou | Sophia Ananiadou | Veselin Stoyanov | Jimin Huang | Xueqing Peng | Preslav Nakov | Zhuohan Xie
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Rania Elbadry | Sarfraz Ahmad | Ahmed Heakl | Dani Bouch | Momina Ahsan | Muhra AlMahri | Marwa Elsaid Khalil | Yuxia Wang | Salem Lahlou | Sophia Ananiadou | Veselin Stoyanov | Jimin Huang | Xueqing Peng | Preslav Nakov | Zhuohan Xie
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
English financial NLP has progressed rapidly through benchmarks for sentiment, document understanding, and financial question answering, while Arabic financial NLP remains comparatively under-explored despite strong practical demand for trustworthy finance and Islamic-finance assistants. We introduce SAHM, a document-grounded benchmark and instruction-tuning dataset for Arabic financial NLP and Shari’ah-compliant reasoning. SAHM contains 14,380 expert-verified instances spanning seven tasks: AAOIFI standards QA, fatwa-based QA/MCQ, accounting and business exams, financial sentiment analysis, extractive summarization, and event–cause reasoning, curated from authentic regulatory, juristic, and corporate sources. We evaluate 19 strong open and proprietary LLMs using task-specific metrics and rubric-based scoring for open-ended outputs, and find that Arabic fluency does not reliably translate to evidence-grounded financial reasoning: models are substantially stronger on recognition-style tasks than on generation and causal reasoning, with the largest gaps on event–cause reasoning. We release the benchmark, evaluation framework, and an instruction-tuned model to support future research on trustworthy Arabic financial NLP.
CASS: Nvidia to AMD Transpilation with Data, Models, and Benchmark
Ahmed Heakl | Gustavo Bertolo Stahl | Sarim Hashmi | Seung Hun Eddie Han | Mukul Ranjan | Arina Kharlamova | Salman Khan | Abdulrahman Mahmoud
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ahmed Heakl | Gustavo Bertolo Stahl | Sarim Hashmi | Seung Hun Eddie Han | Mukul Ranjan | Arina Kharlamova | Salman Khan | Abdulrahman Mahmoud
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Cross-architecture GPU code transpilation is essential for unlocking low-level hardware portability, yet no scalable solution exists. We introduce CASS, the first dataset and model suite for source- and assembly-level GPU translation (CUDA ↔ HIP, SASS ↔ RDNA3). CASS contains 60k verified host-device code pairs, enabling learning-based translation across both ISA and runtime boundaries. We generate each sample using our automated pipeline that scrapes, translates, compiles, and aligns GPU programs across vendor stacks. Leveraging CASS, we train a suite of domain-specific translation models that achieve 88.2% accuracy on CUDA → HIP and 69.1% on SASS → RDNA3, outperforming commercial baselines including GPT-5.1, Claude-4.5, and Hipify by wide margins. Generated code matches native performance in 85% of cases, preserving both runtime and memory behavior. To support rigorous evaluation, we introduce CASS-Bench, a curated benchmark spanning 18 GPU domains with ground-truth execution. All data, models, and evaluation tools will be released as open source to support progress in GPU compiler tooling, binary compatibility, and LLM-guided code translation.
MASEval: Extending Multi-Agent Evaluation from Models to Systems
Cornelius Emde | Alexander Rubinstein | Anmol Goel | Ahmed Heakl | Sangdoo Yun | Seong Joon Oh | Martin Gubri
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Cornelius Emde | Alexander Rubinstein | Anmol Goel | Ahmed Heakl | Sangdoo Yun | Seong Joon Oh | Martin Gubri
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
The rapid adoption of LLM-based agentic systems has produced a rich ecosystem of frameworks (smolagents, LangGraph, AutoGen, CAMEL, LlamaIndex, i.a.). Yet many existing benchmarks are model-centric: they fix the agentic setup and do not compare other system components. We argue that implementation decisions substantially impact performance, including choices such as topology, orchestration logic, and error handling. MASEval addresses this evaluation gap with a Python library that treats the entire agentic system as the unit of analysis. Important design decisions such as harness and context engineering are first-class citizens. MASEval helps practitioners identify the best implementation for their use case and researchers systematically study agentic systems, opening new avenues for principled system design. Through the first systematic system-level comparison across 3 benchmarks, 3 models, and 3 frameworks, we find that, across models of comparable cost and capability, framework choice matters as much as model choice. MASEval is available under the MIT licence at https://github.com/maseval/MASEval.
2025
CAMEL-Bench: A Comprehensive Arabic LMM Benchmark
Sara Ghaboura | Ahmed Heakl | Omkar Thawakar | Ali Husain Salem Abdulla Alharthi | Ines Riahi | Abduljalil Radman | Jorma Laaksonen | Fahad Shahbaz Khan | Salman Khan | Rao Muhammad Anwer
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Sara Ghaboura | Ahmed Heakl | Omkar Thawakar | Ali Husain Salem Abdulla Alharthi | Ines Riahi | Abduljalil Radman | Jorma Laaksonen | Fahad Shahbaz Khan | Salman Khan | Rao Muhammad Anwer
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Recent years have witnessed a significant interest in developing large multi-modal models (LMMs) capable of performing various visual reasoning and understanding tasks. This has led to the introduction of multiple LMM benchmarks to evaluate LMMs on different tasks. However, most existing LMM evaluation benchmarks are predominantly English-centric. In this work, we develop a comprehensive LMM evaluation benchmark for the Arabic language to represent a large population of over 400 million speakers. The proposed benchmark, named CAMEL-Bench, comprises eight diverse domains and 38 sub-domains including, multi-image understanding, complex visual perception, handwritten document understanding, video understanding, medical imaging, plant diseases, and remote sensing-based land use understanding to evaluate broad scenario generalizability. Our CAMEL-Bench comprises around 29,036 questions that are filtered from a larger pool of samples, where the quality is manually verified by native speakers to ensure reliable model assessment. We conduct evaluations of both closed-source, including GPT-4 series, and open-source LMMs. Our analysis reveals the need for substantial improvement, especially among the bestopen-source models, with even the closed-source GPT-4o achieving an overall score of 62%. Our benchmark will be publicly released.
Guaranteed Guess: A Language Modeling Approach for CISC-to-RISC Transpilation with Testing Guarantees
Ahmed Heakl | Sarim Hashmi | Chaimaa Abi | Celine Lee | Abdulrahman Mahmoud
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Ahmed Heakl | Sarim Hashmi | Chaimaa Abi | Celine Lee | Abdulrahman Mahmoud
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
The hardware ecosystem is rapidly evolving, with increasing interest in translating low-level programs across different instruction set architectures (ISAs) in a quick, flexible, and correct way to enhance the portability and longevity of existing code. A particularly challenging class of this transpilation problem is translating between complex- (CISC) and reduced- (RISC) hardware architectures, due to fundamental differences in instruction complexity, memory models, and execution paradigms. In this work, we introduce GG (Guaranteed Guess), an ISA-centric transpilation pipeline that combines the translation power of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with the rigor of established software testing constructs. Our method generates candidate translations using an LLM from one ISA to another, and embeds such translations within a software-testing framework to build quantifiable confidence in the translation. We evaluate our GG approach over two diverse datasets, enforce high code coverage (>98%) across unit tests, and achieve functional/semantic correctness of 99% on HumanEval programs and 49% on BringupBench programs, respectively. Further, we compare our approach to the state-of-the-art Rosetta 2 framework on Apple Silicon, showcasing 1.73× faster runtime performance, 1.47× better energy efficiency, and 2.41× better memory usage for our transpiled code, demonstrating the effectiveness of GG for real-world CISC-to-RISC translation tasks. We will open-source our codes, data, models, and benchmarks to establish a common foundation for ISA-level code translation research.
LlamaV-o1: Rethinking Step-by-step Visual Reasoning in LLMs
Omkar Thawakar | Dinura Dissanayake | Ketan Pravin More | Ritesh Thawkar | Ahmed Heakl | Noor Ahsan | Yuhao Li | Ilmuz Zaman Mohammed Zumri | Jean Lahoud | Rao Muhammad Anwer | Hisham Cholakkal | Ivan Laptev | Mubarak Shah | Fahad Shahbaz Khan | Salman Khan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Omkar Thawakar | Dinura Dissanayake | Ketan Pravin More | Ritesh Thawkar | Ahmed Heakl | Noor Ahsan | Yuhao Li | Ilmuz Zaman Mohammed Zumri | Jean Lahoud | Rao Muhammad Anwer | Hisham Cholakkal | Ivan Laptev | Mubarak Shah | Fahad Shahbaz Khan | Salman Khan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Step-by-step reasoning is crucial for solving complex visual tasks, yet existing approaches lack a comprehensive framework for evaluating this capability and do not emphasize step-wise problem-solving. To this end, we propose a comprehensive framework for advancing multi-step visual reasoning in large multimodal models (LMMs) through three key contributions. First, we introduce a Visual Reasoning Chain Benchmark, the most comprehensive benchmark for multi-step visual reasoning, covering eight diverse categories and over 4k reasoning steps. This enables rigorous evaluation of LMMs’ ability to reason accurately and interpretably across multiple steps. Second, we propose a fine-grained reasoning metric that evaluates correctness and logical coherence at each step, providing deeper insights beyond traditional accuracy metrics. Third, we introduce LlamaV-o1, a state-of-the-art multimodal reasoning model trained using a multi-step curriculum learning approach. LlamaV-o1 is optimized for structured, step-by-step reasoning and significantly outperforms existing open-source models. It surpasses Llava-CoT with a 3.8% absolute gain across six benchmarks, achieving an average score of 67.3 while being 5x faster during inference scaling. Our benchmark, model, and code is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/LlamaV-o1.
KITAB-Bench: A Comprehensive Multi-Domain Benchmark for Arabic OCR and Document Understanding
Ahmed Heakl | Muhammad Abdullah Sohail | Mukul Ranjan | Rania Elbadry | Ghazi Shazan Ahmad | Mohamed El-Geish | Omar Maher | Zhiqiang Shen | Fahad Shahbaz Khan | Salman Khan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Ahmed Heakl | Muhammad Abdullah Sohail | Mukul Ranjan | Rania Elbadry | Ghazi Shazan Ahmad | Mohamed El-Geish | Omar Maher | Zhiqiang Shen | Fahad Shahbaz Khan | Salman Khan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
With the growing adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in document processing, robust text recognition has become increasingly critical for knowledge extraction. While OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for English and other languages benefits from large datasets and well-established benchmarks, Arabic OCR faces unique challenges due to its cursive script, right-to-left text flow, and complex typographic and calligraphic features. We present KITAB-Bench, a comprehensive Arabic OCR benchmark that fills the gaps in current evaluation systems. Our benchmark comprises 8,809 samples across 9 major domains and 36 subdomains, encompassing diverse document types including handwritten text, structured tables, and specialized coverage of 21 chart types for business intelligence. Our findings show that modern vision language models (such as GPT-4o, Gemini, and Qwen) outperform traditional OCR approaches (such as EasyOCR, PaddleOCR, and Surya) by an average of 60% in the character error rate (CER). Furthermore, we highlight significant limitations of current Arabic OCR models, particularly in PDF-to-Markdown conversion, where the best model Gemini-2.0-Flash achieves only 65% accuracy. This underscores the challenges of accurately recognizing Arabic text, including issues with complex fonts, numeral recognition errors, word elongation, and table structure detection. This work establishes a rigorous evaluation framework that can drive improvements in Arabic document analysis methods and bridge the performance gap with English OCR technologies.
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- Salman Khan 5
- Rania Elbadry 3
- Fahad Shahbaz Khan 3
- Yuxia Wang 3
- Muhra AlMahri 2
- Rao Muhammad Anwer 2
- Sarim Hashmi 2
- Abdulrahman Mahmoud 2
- Preslav Nakov 2
- Xueqing Peng 2
- Mukul Ranjan 2
- Omkar Thawakar 2
- Zhuohan Xie 2
- Chaimaa Abi 1
- Ghazi Shazan Ahmad 1
- Sarfraz Ahmad 1
- Momina Ahsan 1
- Noor Ahsan 1
- Ali Husain Salem Abdulla Alharthi 1
- Rafiq Ali 1
- Saeed Almheiri 1
- Sophia Ananiadou 1
- Bdour Babillie 1
- Dani Bouch 1
- Xiuying Chen 1
- Hisham Cholakkal 1
- Qinrong Cui 1
- Dinura Dissanayake 1
- Nazira Dunbayeva 1
- Mohamed El-Geish 1
- Saadeldine Eletter 1
- Cornelius Emde 1
- Lang Gao 1
- Sara Ghaboura 1
- Anmol Goel 1
- Martin Gubri 1
- Seung Hun Eddie Han 1
- Yi Han 1
- Jimin Huang 1
- Omar Hussein 1
- Mohsinul Kabir 1
- Marwa Elsaid Khalil 1
- Arina Kharlamova 1
- Fajri Koto 1
- Jorma Laaksonen 1
- Salem Lahlou 1
- Jean Lahoud 1
- Ivan Laptev 1
- Celine Lee 1
- Yuhao Li 1
- Junhong Liang 1
- Jinghui Liu 1
- Omar Maher 1
- Ahmed Mohamed Magdy Mohamed 1
- Youssef Mohamed 1
- Ketan Pravin More 1
- Ahmed Nada 1
- Seong Joon Oh 1
- Abduljalil Radman 1
- Imran Razzak 1
- Ines Riahi 1
- Alexander Rubinstein 1
- Mubarak Shah 1
- Zhiqiang Shen 1
- Muhammad Abdullah Sohail 1
- Gustavo Bertolo Stahl 1
- Veselin Stoyanov 1
- Ritesh Thawkar 1
- Shuyao Wang 1
- Sangdoo Yun 1
- Duzhen Zhang 1
- Fan Zhang 1
- Ilmuz Zaman Mohammed Zumri 1