arXiv subjects

Mohamed Eltabakh

Publications and source records attributed to Mohamed Eltabakh.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Fanar 2.0: Arabic Generative AI Stack

We present Fanar 2.0, the second generation of Qatar's Arabic-centric Generative AI platform. Sovereignty is a first-class design principle: every component, from data pipelines to deployment infrastructure, was designed and operated entirely at QCRI, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Fanar 2.0 is a story of resource-constrained excellence: the effort ran on 256 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, with Arabic having only ~0.5% of web data despite 400 million native speakers. Fanar 2.0 adopts a disciplined strategy of data quality over quantity, targeted continual pre-training, and model merging to achieve substantial gains within these constraints. At the core is Fanar-27B, continually pre-trained from a Gemma-3-27B backbone on a curated corpus of 120 billion high-quality tokens across three data recipes. Despite using 8x fewer pre-training tokens than Fanar 1.0, it delivers substantial benchmark improvements: Arabic knowledge (+9.1 pts), language (+7.3 pts), dialects (+3.5 pts), and English capability (+7.6 pts). Beyond the core LLM, Fanar 2.0 introduces a rich stack of new capabilities. FanarGuard is a state-of-the-art 4B bilingual moderation filter for Arabic safety and cultural alignment. The speech family Aura gains a long-form ASR model for hours-long audio. Oryx vision family adds Arabic-aware image and video understanding alongside culturally grounded image generation. An agentic tool-calling framework enables multi-step workflows. Fanar-Sadiq utilizes a multi-agent architecture for Islamic content. Fanar-Diwan provides classical Arabic poetry generation. FanarShaheen delivers LLM-powered bilingual translation. A redesigned multi-layer orchestrator coordinates all components through intent-aware routing and defense-in-depth safety validation. Taken together, Fanar 2.0 demonstrates that sovereign, resource-constrained AI development can produce systems competitive with those built at far greater scale.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

HCT-QA: A Benchmark for Question Answering on Human-Centric Tables

Tabular data embedded in PDF files, web pages, and other types of documents is prevalent in various domains. These tables, which we call human-centric tables (HCTs for short), are dense in information but often exhibit complex structural and semantic layouts. To query these HCTs, some existing solutions focus on transforming them into relational formats. However, they fail to handle the diverse and complex layouts of HCTs, making them not amenable to easy querying with SQL-based approaches. Another emerging option is to use Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, there is a lack of standard evaluation benchmarks to measure and compare the performance of models to query HCTs using natural language. To address this gap, we propose the HumanCentric Tables Question-Answering extensive benchmark (HCTQA) consisting of thousands of HCTs with several thousands of natural language questions with their respective answers. More specifically, HCT-QA includes 1,880 real-world HCTs with 9,835 QA pairs in addition to 4,679 synthetic HCTs with 67.7K QA pairs. Also, we show through extensive experiments the performance of 25 and 9 different LLMS and VLMs, respectively, in an answering HCT-QA's questions. In addition, we show how finetuning an LLM on HCT-QA improves F1 scores by up to 25 percentage points compared to the off-the-shelf model. Compared to existing benchmarks, HCT-QA stands out for its broad complexity and diversity of covered HCTs and generated questions, its comprehensive metadata enabling deeper insight and analysis, and its novel synthetic data and QA generator.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Fanar: An Arabic-Centric Multimodal Generative AI Platform

We present Fanar, a platform for Arabic-centric multimodal generative AI systems, that supports language, speech and image generation tasks. At the heart of Fanar are Fanar Star and Fanar Prime, two highly capable Arabic Large Language Models (LLMs) that are best in the class on well established benchmarks for similar sized models. Fanar Star is a 7B (billion) parameter model that was trained from scratch on nearly 1 trillion clean and deduplicated Arabic, English and Code tokens. Fanar Prime is a 9B parameter model continually trained on the Gemma-2 9B base model on the same 1 trillion token set. Both models are concurrently deployed and designed to address different types of prompts transparently routed through a custom-built orchestrator. The Fanar platform provides many other capabilities including a customized Islamic Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system for handling religious prompts, a Recency RAG for summarizing information about current or recent events that have occurred after the pre-training data cut-off date. The platform provides additional cognitive capabilities including in-house bilingual speech recognition that supports multiple Arabic dialects, voice and image generation that is fine-tuned to better reflect regional characteristics. Finally, Fanar provides an attribution service that can be used to verify the authenticity of fact based generated content. The design, development, and implementation of Fanar was entirely undertaken at Hamad Bin Khalifa University's Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and was sponsored by Qatar's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to enable sovereign AI technology development.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

RetClean: Retrieval-Based Data Cleaning Using Foundation Models and Data Lakes

Can foundation models (such as ChatGPT) clean your data? In this proposal, we demonstrate that indeed ChatGPT can assist in data cleaning by suggesting corrections for specific cells in a data table (scenario 1). However, ChatGPT may struggle with datasets it has never encountered before (e.g., local enterprise data) or when the user requires an explanation of the source of the suggested clean values. To address these issues, we developed a retrieval-based method that complements ChatGPT's power with a user-provided data lake. The data lake is first indexed, we then retrieve the top-k relevant tuples to the user's query tuple and finally leverage ChatGPT to infer the correct value (scenario 2). Nevertheless, sharing enterprise data with ChatGPT, an externally hosted model, might not be feasible for privacy reasons. To assist with this scenario, we developed a custom RoBERTa-based foundation model that can be locally deployed. By fine-tuning it on a small number of examples, it can effectively make value inferences based on the retrieved tuples (scenario 3). Our proposed system, RetClean, seamlessly supports all three scenarios and provides a user-friendly GUI that enables the VLDB audience to explore and experiment with the system.

cs.DB↗