Papers by Walid Ahmed
Pearl: A Multimodal Culturally-Aware Arabic Instruction Dataset (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fakhraddin Alwajih, Samar M. Magdy, Abdellah El Mekki, Omer Nacar, Youssef Nafea, Safaa Taher Abdelfadil, Abdulfattah Mohammed Yahya, Hamzah Luqman, Nada Almarwani, Samah Aloufi, Baraah Qawasmeh, Houdaifa Atou, Serry Sibaee, Hamzah A. Alsayadi, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Maged S. Al-shaibani, Aya El aatar, Nour Qandos, Rahaf Alhamouri, Samar Ahmad, Mohammed Anwar AL-Ghrawi, Aminetou Yacoub, Ruwa AbuHweidi, Vatimetou Mohamed Lemin, Reem Abdel-Salam, Ahlam Bashiti, Adel Ammar, Aisha Alansari, Ahmed Ashraf, Nora Alturayeif, Alcides Alcoba Inciarte, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Mohamedou Cheikh Tourad, Ismail Berrada, Mustafa Jarrar, Shady Shehata, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | Mainstream large vision-language models (LVLMs) inherently encode cultural biases, highlighting the need for diverse multimodal datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a large-scale Arabic multimodal dataset and benchmark explicitly designed for cultural understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers ten culturally significant domains covering all Arab countries and includes two evaluation benchmarks (PEARL and PEARL-LITE) and a specialized subset (PearL-X). |
Part-of-Speech Tagging for Arabic Gulf Dialect Using Bi-LSTM (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is one of the most important building blocks in many natural language processing (NLP) applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a POS tagger for Arabic Gulf dialect to improve POS tagging accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed POS tagger improves POS tagging accuracy for the Arabic Gulf dialect from 75% accuracy to 91% accuracy using a bi-LSTM labeler. |
FlowHN: Adaptive Token Routing for Efficient Parallel Hybrid Networks (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing hybrids lack performance, latency, and cost-efficient scaling for production LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a deployment-oriented parallel hybrid architecture that enables deterministic conditional computation via FLOP-aware token circulation across attention and SSM branches. |
| Outcome: | FlowHN achieves 4 higher throughput and 15% higher MFU than current models while maintaining competitive accuracy on reasoning, coding, and long-context tasks. |
Multi-Dialect Arabic POS Tagging: A CRF Approach (L18-1)
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Kareem Darwish, Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmed Abdelali, Mohamed Eldesouki, Younes Samih, Randah Alharbi, Mohammed Attia, Walid Magdy, Laura Kallmeyer
| Challenge: | Existing work on dialectal POS tagging is rather scant with POS tags for most dialects being nonexistent or of limited availability. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of POS-tagged Arabic tweets in four major dialects and a tagging guideline for each dialect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can tag four different dialects with an average accuracy of 89.3%. |
FLOP-Efficient Training: Early Stopping Based on Test-Time Compute Awareness (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work shows that increasing test-time compute (TTC) can improve accuracy of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a TTC-aware training algorithm that jointly selects a checkpoint and a corresponding TTC configuration to minimize training compute without sacrificing accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces training compute by 92% while maintaining accuracy. |
Palm: A Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse Dataset for Arabic LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki, Samar Mohamed Magdy, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Omer Nacar, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Reem Abdel-Salam, Hanin Atwany, Youssef Nafea, Abdulfattah Mohammed Yahya, Rahaf Alhamouri, Hamzah A. Alsayadi, Hiba Zayed, Sara Shatnawi, Serry Sibaee, Yasir Ech-chammakhy, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Marwa Mohamed Ali, Imen Jarraya, Ahmed Oumar El-Shangiti, Aisha Alraeesi, Mohammed Anwar AL-Ghrawi, Abdulrahman S. Al-Batati, Elgizouli Mohamed, Noha Taha Elgindi, Muhammed Saeed, Houdaifa Atou, Issam Ait Yahia, Abdelhak Bouayad, Mohammed Machrouh, Amal Makouar, Dania Alkawi, Mukhtar Mohamed, Safaa Taher Abdelfadil, Amine Ziad Ounnoughene, Anfel Rouabhia, Rwaa Assi, Ahmed Sorkatti, Mohamedou Cheikh Tourad, Anis Koubaa, Ismail Berrada, Mustafa Jarrar, Shady Shehata, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | a year-long community-driven project covering all 22 Arab countries evaluates the cultural and dialectal capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a project to evaluate the cultural and dialectal capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The project evaluates the cultural and dialectal capabilities of several frontier LLMs. |
Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition (2024.emnlp-main)
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Bashar Talafha, Karima Kadaoui, Samar Magdy, Mariem Habiboullah, Chafei Chafei, Ahmed El-Shangiti, Hiba Zayed, Mohamedou Tourad, Rahaf Alhamouri, Rwaa Assi, Aisha Alraeesi, Hour Mohamed, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Abdellah El Mekki, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Benelhadj Saadia, Hamzah Alsayadi, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Sara Shatnawi, Yasir Ech-chammakhy, Amal Makouar, Yousra Berrachedi, Mustafa Jarrar, Shady Shehata, Ismail Berrada, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | despite recent advances in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. |
| Approach: | They propose to collect and transcribe a new Arabic dataset for eight dialects . they also develop strong baselines exploiting the new dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers eight Arabic dialects, including Algerian, Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni. |
ECHO-LLaMA: Efficient Caching for High-Performance LLaMA Training (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Maryam Dialameh, Rezaul Karim, Hossein Rajabzadeh, Omar Mohamed Awad, Boxing Chen, Hyock Ju Kwon, Walid Ahmed, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | ECHO-LLaMA transforms LLa MA models into shared KV caching across certain layers, significantly reducing KV computational complexity while maintaining or improving language performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient LLaMA architecture that transforms LLama models into shared KV caching across certain layers, reducing computational complexity while maintaining or improving language performance. |
| Outcome: | ECHO-LLaMA achieves up to 77% higher token-per-second throughput during training, up to 16% higher Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) and up to 14% lower loss when trained on an equal number of tokens. |