Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have proven effective in a wide range of tasks that require complex reasoning and linguistic comprehension. However, due to a lack of high-quality multimodal resources in languages other than English, the success of MLLMs remains relatively limited to English-based settings. This poses significant challenges in developing comparable models for other languages, even those with large speaker populations, such as Arabic. To alleviate this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive family of Arabic MLLMs, dubbed *Peacock*, with strong vision and language capabilities. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate the solid performance of our models on various visual reasoning tasks and further show their emerging dialectal potential. Additionally, we introduce *Henna*, a new benchmark specifically designed for assessing MLLMs on aspects related to Arabic culture, setting the first stone for culturally-aware Arabic MLLMs. The GitHub repository for the *Peacock* project is available at [https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock](https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock).

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for a wide range of language generation tasks. Nevertheless, this progress has been slower in Arabic. In this work, we focus on the task of generating stories from LLMs. For our training, we use stories acquired through machine translation (MT) as well as GPT-4. For the MT data, we develop a careful pipeline that ensures we acquire high-quality stories. For our GPT-4 data, we introduce crafted prompts that allow us to generate data well-suited to the Arabic context in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and two Arabic dialects (Egyptian and Moroccan). For example, we generate stories tailored to various Arab countries on a wide host of topics. Our manual evaluation shows that our model fine-tuned on these training datasets can generate coherent stories that adhere to our instructions. We also conduct an extensive automatic and human evaluation comparing our models against state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models. Our datasets and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/arastories.

Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwriting Recognition (HWR) pose unique challenges due to the cursive and context-sensitive nature of the Arabic script. This study introduces ***Qalam***, a novel foundation model designed for Arabic OCR and HWR, built on a SwinV2 encoder and RoBERTa decoder architecture. Our model significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a Word Error Rate (WER) of just 0.80% in HWR tasks and 1.18% in OCR tasks. We train ***Qalam*** on a diverse dataset, including over 4.5 million images from Arabic manuscripts and a synthetic dataset comprising 60k image-text pairs. Notably, ***Qalam*** demonstrates exceptional handling of Arabic diacritics, a critical feature in Arabic scripts. Furthermore, it shows a remarkable ability to process high-resolution inputs, addressing a common limitation in current OCR systems. These advancements underscore ***Qalam***’s potential as a leading solution for Arabic script recognition, offering a significant leap in accuracy and efficiency.

Recent advancements have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in generating and understanding image-to-text content. Despite these successes, progress is predominantly limited to English due to the scarcity of high-quality multimodal resources in other languages. This limitation impedes the development of competitive models in languages such as Arabic. To alleviate this situation, we introduce an efficient Arabic multimodal assistant, dubbed ***Dallah***, that utilizes an advanced language model based on LLaMA-2 to facilitate multimodal interactions. ***Dallah*** demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in Arabic MLLMs. Through fine-tuning six Arabic dialects, ***Dallah*** showcases its capability to handle complex dialectal interactions incorporating both textual and visual elements. The model excels in two benchmark tests: one evaluating its performance on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and another specifically designed to assess dialectal responses. Beyond its robust performance in multimodal interaction tasks, ***Dallah*** has the potential to pave the way for further development of dialect-aware Arabic MLLMs.

Although image captioning has a vast array of applications, it has not reached its full potential in languages other than English. Arabic, for instance, although the native language of more than 400 million people, remains largely underrepresented in this area. This is due to the lack of labeled data and powerful Arabic generative models. We alleviate this issue by presenting a novel vision-language model dedicated to Arabic, dubbed Violet. Our model is based on a vision encoder and a Gemini text decoder that maintains generation fluency while allowing fusion between the vision and language components. To train our model, we introduce a new method for automatically acquiring data from available English datasets. We also manually prepare a new dataset for evaluation. Violet performs sizeably better than our baselines on all of our evaluation datasets. For example, it reaches a CIDEr score of 61.2 on our manually annotated dataset and achieves an improvement of 13 points on Flickr8k.