arXiv subjects

Ismail Berrada

Publications and source records attributed to Ismail Berrada.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

LeGo-Code: Can Modular Curriculum Learning Advance Complex Code Generation? Insights from Text-to-SQL

Recently, code-oriented large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in translating natural language into executable code. Text-to-SQL is a significant application of this ability, enabling non-technical users to interact with relational databases using natural language. However, state-of-the-art models continue to struggle with highly complex logic, particularly deeply nested statements involving multiple joins and conditions, as well as with real-world database schemas that are noisy or poorly structured. In this paper, we investigate whether curriculum learning can improve the performance of code-based LLMs on Text-to-SQL tasks. Employing benchmarks including Spider and BIRD, we fine-tune models under different curriculum strategies. Our experiments show that naive curriculum, simply ordering training samples by complexity in a single epoch, fails to surpass standard fine-tuning due to catastrophic forgetting. To overcome this, we propose a Modular Adapter Composition (MAC) strategy. By sequentially training tier-specific adapters on incremental complexity levels (Easy to Extra-Hard), we create a scaffolded learning environment that improves performance on complex queries. Our approach not only produces measurable performance gains on the Spider and BIRD benchmarks but also provides a flexible, "Lego-like" architecture, allowing models to be composed and deployed based on specific schema difficulty requirements. These findings demonstrate that structured, modular learning is a superior alternative to monolithic fine-tuning for mastering the syntax and logic of complex code generation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Deep Learning for Contextualized NetFlow-Based Network Intrusion Detection: Methods, Data, Evaluation and Deployment

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) have progressively shifted from signature-based techniques toward machine learning and, more recently, deep learning methods. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of encryption has reduced payload visibility, weakening inspection pipelines that depend on plaintext content and increasing reliance on flow-level telemetry such as NetFlow and IPFIX. Many current learning-based detectors still frame intrusion detection as per-flow classification, implicitly treating each flow record as an independent sample. This assumption is often violated in realistic attack campaigns, where evidence is distributed across multiple flows and hosts, spanning minutes to days through staged execution, beaconing, lateral movement, and exfiltration. This paper synthesizes recent research on context-aware deep learning for flow-based intrusion detection. We organize existing methods into a four-dimensional taxonomy covering temporal context, graph or relational context, multimodal context, and multi-resolution context. Beyond modeling, we emphasize rigorous evaluation and operational realism. We review common failure modes that can inflate reported results, including temporal leakage, data splitting, dataset design flaws, limited dataset diversity, and weak cross-dataset generalization. We also analyze practical constraints that shape deployability, such as streaming state management, memory growth, latency budgets, and model compression choices. Overall, the literature suggests that context can meaningfully improve detection when attacks induce measurable temporal or relational structure, but the magnitude and reliability of these gains depend strongly on rigorous, causal evaluation and on datasets that capture realistic diversity.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Alexandria: A Multi-Domain Dialectal Arabic Machine Translation Dataset for Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse LLMs

Arabic is a highly diglossic language where most daily communication occurs in regional dialects rather than Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Despite this, machine translation (MT) systems often generalize poorly to dialectal input, limiting their utility for millions of speakers. We introduce Alexandria, a large-scale, community-driven, human-translated dataset designed to bridge this gap. Alexandria covers 13 Arab countries and 11 high-impact domains, including health, education, and agriculture. Unlike previous resources, Alexandria provides unprecedented granularity by associating contributions with city-of-origin metadata, capturing authentic local varieties beyond coarse regional labels. The dataset consists of parallel English-Dialectal Arabic multi-turn conversational scenarios annotated with speaker-addressee gender configurations, enabling the study of gender-conditioned variation in dialectal use. Comprising 107K total turns, Alexandria serves as both a training resource and as a rigorous benchmark for evaluating MT and Large Language Models (LLMs). Our automatic and human evaluation benchmarks the current capabilities of Arabic-aware LLMs in translating across diverse Arabic dialects and sub-dialects while exposing significant persistent challenges. The Alexandria dataset, the creation prompts, the translation and revision guidelines, and the evaluation code are publicly available in the following repository: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/Alexandria

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Pearl: A Multimodal Culturally-Aware Arabic Instruction Dataset

Mainstream large vision-language models (LVLMs) inherently encode cultural biases, highlighting the need for diverse multimodal datasets. To address this gap, we introduce PEARL, a large-scale Arabic multimodal dataset and benchmark explicitly designed for cultural understanding. Constructed through advanced agentic workflows and extensive human-in-the-loop annotations by 37 annotators from across the Arab world, PEARL comprises over 309K multimodal examples spanning ten culturally significant domains covering all Arab countries. We further provide two robust evaluation benchmarks (PEARL and PEARL-LITE) along with a specialized subset (PEARL-X) explicitly developed to assess nuanced cultural variations. Comprehensive evaluations on state-of-the-art open and proprietary LVLMs demonstrate that reasoning-centric instruction alignment substantially improves models' cultural grounding compared to conventional scaling methods. PEARL establishes a foundational resource for advancing culturally-informed multimodal modeling research. All datasets and benchmarks are publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

GemMaroc: Unlocking Darija Proficiency in LLMs with Minimal Data

Open-source large language models (LLMs) still marginalise Moroccan Arabic (Darija), forcing practitioners either to bolt on heavyweight Arabic adapters or to sacrifice the very reasoning skills that make LLMs useful. We show that a rigorously quality-over-quantity alignment strategy can surface fluent Darija while safeguarding the backbone s cross-lingual reasoning at a sliver of the usual compute. We translate three compact instruction suites LIMA 1 K, DEITA 6 K and TULU 50 K into Darija, preserve 20 of the English originals, and add mathematics, coding and scientific prompts. A LoRA-tuned Gemma 3-4B trained on 5 K mixed instructions lifts DarijaMMLU from 32.8 to 42.7 ; adding the reasoning-dense TULU portion pushes it to 47.5 with no English regression. Scaling the identical recipe to Gemma 3-27B produces GemMaroc-27B, which matches Atlas-Chat on DarijaMMLU (61.6 ) and leaps ahead on Darija commonsense, scoring 60.5 on HellaSwag versus Atlas-Chat s 48.4 . Crucially, GemMaroc retains Gemma-27B s strong maths and general-reasoning ability, showing only minimal movement on GSM8K and English benchmarks. The entire model is trained in just 48 GPU.h, underscoring a Green AI pathway to inclusive, sustainable language technology. We release code, data and checkpoints to spur Darija-centric applications in education, public services and everyday digital interaction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

AI-based identification and support of at-risk students: A case study of the Moroccan education system

Student dropout is a global issue influenced by personal, familial, and academic factors, with varying rates across countries. This paper introduces an AI-driven predictive modeling approach to identify students at risk of dropping out using advanced machine learning techniques. The goal is to enable timely interventions and improve educational outcomes. Our methodology is adaptable across different educational systems and levels. By employing a rigorous evaluation framework, we assess model performance and use Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to identify key factors influencing predictions. The approach was tested on real data provided by the Moroccan Ministry of National Education, achieving 88% accuracy, 88% recall, 86% precision, and an AUC of 87%. These results highlight the effectiveness of the AI models in identifying at-risk students. The framework is adaptable, incorporating historical data for both short and long-term detection, offering a comprehensive solution to the persistent challenge of student dropout.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Palm: A Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse Dataset for Arabic LLMs

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, ensuring their cultural sensitivity and inclusivity is paramount. We introduce our dataset, a year-long community-driven project covering all 22 Arab countries. The dataset includes instructions (input, response pairs) in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and dialectal Arabic (DA), spanning 20 diverse topics. Built by a team of 44 researchers across the Arab world, all of whom are authors of this paper, our dataset offers a broad, inclusive perspective. We use our dataset to evaluate the cultural and dialectal capabilities of several frontier LLMs, revealing notable limitations. For instance, while closed-source LLMs generally exhibit strong performance, they are not without flaws, and smaller open-source models face greater challenges. Moreover, certain countries (e.g., Egypt, the UAE) appear better represented than others (e.g., Iraq, Mauritania, Yemen). Our annotation guidelines, code, and data for reproducibility are publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

KoopAGRU: A Koopman-based Anomaly Detection in Time-Series using Gated Recurrent Units

Anomaly detection in real-world time-series data is a challenging task due to the complex and nonlinear temporal dynamics involved. This paper introduces KoopAGRU, a new deep learning model designed to tackle this problem by combining Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Deep Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DeepDMD), and Koopman theory. FFT allows KoopAGRU to decompose temporal data into time-variant and time-invariant components providing precise modeling of complex patterns. To better control these two components, KoopAGRU utilizes Gate Recurrent Unit (GRU) encoders to learn Koopman observables, enhancing the detection capability across multiple temporal scales. KoopAGRU is trained in a single process and offers fast inference times. Extensive tests on various benchmark datasets show that KoopAGRU outperforms other leading methods, achieving a new average F1-score of 90.88\% on the well-known anomalies detection task of times series datasets, and proves to be efficient and reliable in detecting anomalies in real-world scenarios.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Dialect2SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Dataset for Arabic Dialects with a Focus on Moroccan Darija

The task of converting natural language questions (NLQs) into executable SQL queries, known as text-to-SQL, has gained significant interest in recent years, as it enables non-technical users to interact with relational databases. Many benchmarks, such as SPIDER and WikiSQL, have contributed to the development of new models and the evaluation of their performance. In addition, other datasets, like SEDE and BIRD, have introduced more challenges and complexities to better map real-world scenarios. However, these datasets primarily focus on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. In this work, we introduce Dialect2SQL, the first large-scale, cross-domain text-to-SQL dataset in an Arabic dialect. It consists of 9,428 NLQ-SQL pairs across 69 databases in various domains. Along with SQL-related challenges such as long schemas, dirty values, and complex queries, our dataset also incorporates the complexities of the Moroccan dialect, which is known for its diverse source languages, numerous borrowed words, and unique expressions. This demonstrates that our dataset will be a valuable contribution to both the text-to-SQL community and the development of resources for low-resource languages.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition

In spite of the recent progress in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. This situation only furthers an already wide technological divide, thereby hindering technological and socioeconomic inclusion. This challenge is largely due to the absence of datasets that can empower diverse speech systems. In this paper, we seek to mitigate this obstacle for a number of Arabic dialects by presenting Casablanca, a large-scale community-driven effort to collect and transcribe a multi-dialectal Arabic dataset. The dataset covers eight dialects: Algerian, Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni, and includes annotations for transcription, gender, dialect, and code-switching. We also develop a number of strong baselines exploiting Casablanca. The project page for Casablanca is accessible at: www.dlnlp.ai/speech/casablanca.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

DomURLs_BERT: Pre-trained BERT-based Model for Malicious Domains and URLs Detection and Classification

Detecting and classifying suspicious or malicious domain names and URLs is fundamental task in cybersecurity. To leverage such indicators of compromise, cybersecurity vendors and practitioners often maintain and update blacklists of known malicious domains and URLs. However, blacklists frequently fail to identify emerging and obfuscated threats. Over the past few decades, there has been significant interest in developing machine learning models that automatically detect malicious domains and URLs, addressing the limitations of blacklists maintenance and updates. In this paper, we introduce DomURLs_BERT, a pre-trained BERT-based encoder adapted for detecting and classifying suspicious/malicious domains and URLs. DomURLs_BERT is pre-trained using the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective on a large multilingual corpus of URLs, domain names, and Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) dataset. In order to assess the performance of DomURLs_BERT, we have conducted experiments on several binary and multi-class classification tasks involving domain names and URLs, covering phishing, malware, DGA, and DNS tunneling. The evaluations results show that the proposed encoder outperforms state-of-the-art character-based deep learning models and cybersecurity-focused BERT models across multiple tasks and datasets. The pre-training dataset, the pre-trained DomURLs_BERT encoder, and the experiments source code are publicly available.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

AraFinNLP 2024: The First Arabic Financial NLP Shared Task

The expanding financial markets of the Arab world require sophisticated Arabic NLP tools. To address this need within the banking domain, the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) shared task proposes two subtasks: (i) Multi-dialect Intent Detection and (ii) Cross-dialect Translation and Intent Preservation. This shared task uses the updated ArBanking77 dataset, which includes about 39k parallel queries in MSA and four dialects. Each query is labeled with one or more of a common 77 intents in the banking domain. These resources aim to foster the development of robust financial Arabic NLP, particularly in the areas of machine translation and banking chat-bots. A total of 45 unique teams registered for this shared task, with 11 of them actively participated in the test phase. Specifically, 11 teams participated in Subtask 1, while only 1 team participated in Subtask 2. The winning team of Subtask 1 achieved F1 score of 0.8773, and the only team submitted in Subtask 2 achieved a 1.667 BLEU score.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

DarijaBanking: A New Resource for Overcoming Language Barriers in Banking Intent Detection for Moroccan Arabic Speakers

Navigating the complexities of language diversity is a central challenge in developing robust natural language processing systems, especially in specialized domains like banking. The Moroccan Dialect (Darija) serves as the common language that blends cultural complexities, historical impacts, and regional differences. The complexities of Darija present a special set of challenges for language models, as it differs from Modern Standard Arabic with strong influence from French, Spanish, and Tamazight, it requires a specific approach for effective communication. To tackle these challenges, this paper introduces \textbf{DarijaBanking}, a novel Darija dataset aimed at enhancing intent classification in the banking domain, addressing the critical need for automatic banking systems (e.g., chatbots) that communicate in the native language of Moroccan clients. DarijaBanking comprises over 1,800 parallel high-quality queries in Darija, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), English, and French, organized into 24 intent classes. We experimented with various intent classification methods, including full fine-tuning of monolingual and multilingual models, zero-shot learning, retrieval-based approaches, and Large Language Model prompting. One of the main contributions of this work is BERTouch, our BERT-based language model for intent classification in Darija. BERTouch achieved F1-scores of 0.98 for Darija and 0.96 for MSA on DarijaBanking, outperforming the state-of-the-art alternatives including GPT-4 showcasing its effectiveness in the targeted application.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Arabic Text Diacritization In The Age Of Transfer Learning: Token Classification Is All You Need

Automatic diacritization of Arabic text involves adding diacritical marks (diacritics) to the text. This task poses a significant challenge with noteworthy implications for computational processing and comprehension. In this paper, we introduce PTCAD (Pre-FineTuned Token Classification for Arabic Diacritization, a novel two-phase approach for the Arabic Text Diacritization task. PTCAD comprises a pre-finetuning phase and a finetuning phase, treating Arabic Text Diacritization as a token classification task for pre-trained models. The effectiveness of PTCAD is demonstrated through evaluations on two benchmark datasets derived from the Tashkeela dataset, where it achieves state-of-the-art results, including a 20\% reduction in Word Error Rate (WER) compared to existing benchmarks and superior performance over GPT-4 in ATD tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

CT-xCOV: a CT-scan based Explainable Framework for COVid-19 diagnosis

In this work, CT-xCOV, an explainable framework for COVID-19 diagnosis using Deep Learning (DL) on CT-scans is developed. CT-xCOV adopts an end-to-end approach from lung segmentation to COVID-19 detection and explanations of the detection model's prediction. For lung segmentation, we used the well-known U-Net model. For COVID-19 detection, we compared three different CNN architectures: a standard CNN, ResNet50, and DenseNet121. After the detection, visual and textual explanations are provided. For visual explanations, we applied three different XAI techniques, namely, Grad-Cam, Integrated Gradient (IG), and LIME. Textual explanations are added by computing the percentage of infection by lungs. To assess the performance of the used XAI techniques, we propose a ground-truth-based evaluation method, measuring the similarity between the visualization outputs and the ground-truth infections. The performed experiments show that the applied DL models achieved good results. The U-Net segmentation model achieved a high Dice coefficient (98%). The performance of our proposed classification model (standard CNN) was validated using 5-fold cross-validation (acc of 98.40% and f1-score 98.23%). Lastly, the results of the comparison of XAI techniques show that Grad-Cam gives the best explanations compared to LIME and IG, by achieving a Dice coefficient of 55%, on COVID-19 positive scans, compared to 29% and 24% obtained by IG and LIME respectively. The code and the dataset used in this paper are available in the GitHub repository [1].

eess.IV↗

arXiv2023

ProMap: Effective Bilingual Lexicon Induction via Language Model Prompting

Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI), where words are translated between two languages, is an important NLP task. While noticeable progress on BLI in rich resource languages using static word embeddings has been achieved. The word translation performance can be further improved by incorporating information from contextualized word embeddings. In this paper, we introduce ProMap, a novel approach for BLI that leverages the power of prompting pretrained multilingual and multidialectal language models to address these challenges. To overcome the employment of subword tokens in these models, ProMap relies on an effective padded prompting of language models with a seed dictionary that achieves good performance when used independently. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of ProMap in re-ranking results from other BLI methods such as with aligned static word embeddings. When evaluated on both rich-resource and low-resource languages, ProMap consistently achieves state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, ProMap enables strong performance in few-shot scenarios (even with less than 10 training examples), making it a valuable tool for low-resource language translation. Overall, we believe our method offers both exciting and promising direction for BLI in general and low-resource languages in particular. ProMap code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/4mekki4/promap}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Deep Multi-Task Models for Misogyny Identification and Categorization on Arabic Social Media

The prevalence of toxic content on social media platforms, such as hate speech, offensive language, and misogyny, presents serious challenges to our interconnected society. These challenging issues have attracted widespread attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. In this paper, we present the submitted systems to the first Arabic Misogyny Identification shared task. We investigate three multi-task learning models as well as their single-task counterparts. In order to encode the input text, our models rely on the pre-trained MARBERT language model. The overall obtained results show that all our submitted models have achieved the best performances (top three ranked submissions) in both misogyny identification and categorization tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

CS-UM6P at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Transformer-based Models for Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic

Sarcasm is a form of figurative language where the intended meaning of a sentence differs from its literal meaning. This poses a serious challenge to several Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Author Profiling. In this paper, we present our participating system to the intended sarcasm detection task in English and Arabic languages. Our system\footnote{The source code of our system is available at \url{https://github.com/AbdelkaderMH/iSarcasmEval}} consists of three deep learning-based models leveraging two existing pre-trained language models for Arabic and English. We have participated in all sub-tasks. Our official submissions achieve the best performance on sub-task A for Arabic language and rank second in sub-task B. For sub-task C, our system is ranked 7th and 11th on Arabic and English datasets, respectively.

cs.CL↗