# Kuwain 1.5B: An Arabic SLM via Language Injection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15120 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15120/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02385/) (2024)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [Efficient and Effective Text Encoding for Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08177/) (2023)
- [The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of the Deeper Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17887/) (2024)
- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [Byte Pair Encoding is Suboptimal for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03720/) (2020)
- [CulturaX: A Cleaned, Enormous, and Multilingual Dataset for Large Language Models in 167 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09400/) (2023)
- [Continual Pre-Training of Large Language Models: How to (re)warm your model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04014/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws with Vocabulary: Larger Models Deserve Larger Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13623/) (2024)
- [Tokenizer Choice For LLM Training: Negligible or Crucial?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08754/) (2023)
- [Don't Trust ChatGPT when Your Question is not in English: A Study of Multilingual Abilities and Types of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16339/) (2023)
- [LLaMA Pro: Progressive LLaMA with Block Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02415/) (2024)
- [Language Contamination Helps Explain the Cross-lingual Capabilities of English Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08110/) (2022)
- [BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09535/) (2022)
- [AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12053/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Instruction Tuning With Just a Pinch of Multilinguality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01854/) (2024)
- [Jais and Jais-chat: Arabic-Centric Foundation and Instruction-Tuned Open Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16149/) (2023)
- [ALLaM: Large Language Models for Arabic and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15390/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Mutarjim: Advancing Bidirectional Arabic-English Translation with a Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17894/) (2025)
- [Sadeed: Advancing Arabic Diacritization Through Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21635/) (2025)
- [RightNow-Arabic-0.5B-Turbo: An Open Sub-1B Arabic Language Model via Vocabulary Injection and Edge-First Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28827/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enhancing existing models with new knowledge is a crucial aspect of AI development. This paper introduces a novel method for integrating a new language into a large language model (LLM). Our approach successfully incorporates a previously unseen target language into an existing LLM without compromising its prior knowledge. We trained a tiny model with 1.5 billion parameters named Kuwain by injecting the Arabic language into a small open-source model mainly trained in English. Our method demonstrates significant improvements in Arabic language performance, with an average 8% improvement across various benchmarks, while retaining the model's existing knowledge with a minimum amount of the original model's data. This offers a cost-effective alternative to training a comprehensive model in both English and Arabic. The results highlight the potential for efficient, targeted language model expansion without extensive retraining or resource-intensive processes.