We present our approach in this submission for ArGuard 2026 Subtask B1, which classifies Arabic prompts directed at large language models as Safe or Unsafe. Our system combines four sparse TF-IDF feature representations with dialect indicators and surface-level features. We trained logistic regression and Naive-Bayes SVM (NBSVM) classifiers and combined their predictions using late fusion. The system achieved a Macro-F1 score of 0.94 and an accuracy of 0.96 on the development set. On the test set, our submission achieved 0.79 accuracy, 0.85 macro precision, 0.71 macro recall, and 0.72 Macro-F1.

The classification task for ArGuard 2026 Track A, Subtask A1, identifies whether an Arabic meme is Hateful or Not Hateful. Our system combines three separately trained models. In the first experiment, we use word-level and character-level features with balanced linear classifiers. In the second experiment, we fine- tune MARBERT for text classification using class-balanced focal loss. In the third experi- ment, we use a frozen SigLIP image encoder with balanced logistic regression. We combine the Class-1 probabilities from the three mod- els using late fusion. On the test set, the fused model achieved a Macro-F1 score of 0.76 and an accuracy of 0.79

The classification of Arabic prompts as Safe or Unsafe is the focus of this submission to ArGuard 2026 Subtask B1. We developed a lightweight hybrid classifier that combines lexical and semantic information. The lexical branch uses normalized word-level and character-level features with a class-balanced LinearSVC classifier. The semantic branch uses frozen multilingual E5 embeddings with a class-balanced logistic regression classifier. We combined the outputs of both branches using late fusion. On the development set, LinearSVC achieved a Macro-F1 score of 0.93, while the frozen E5 branch achieved 0.88. The final hybrid system achieved a Macro-F1 score of 0.93. On the test set, the submitted system achieved 0.78 accuracy, 0.83 precision, 0.70 recall, and 0.72 Macro-F1.