RightNow-Arabic-0.5B-Turbo: An Open Sub-1B Arabic Language Model via Vocabulary Injection and Edge-First Deployment
Open Arabic large language models split into two classes: sub-1B multilingual models that treat Arabic as an afterthought (Qwen2.5-0.5B, Falcon-H1-0.5B), and 7B-70B Arabic-specialized models that require a server to run (Jais, AceGPT, ALLaM, SILMA). The one published attempt at a sub-2B Arabic-specialized model, Kuwain-1.5B, never released its weights. We present RightNow-Arabic-0.5B-Turbo, a 518M-parameter Arabic-specialized decoder LLM built on Qwen2.5-0.5B. The pipeline adds 27,032 Arabic tokens via mean-subtoken initialization, continues pretraining on 504M Arabic tokens on 8xH100 with FSDP, FlashAttention varlen packing, and Liger fused kernels, then applies supervised fine-tuning on...
| Authors | Jaber Jaber, Osama Jaber |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 April 2026 |
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