Riazi-8B: An Urdu Large Language Model for Mathematical Reasoning
Azher Ali, Ibtsam Haider, Raja Khurram Shahzad, Seemab Latif, Mehwish Fatima
Abstract
Recent LLMs demonstrate strong mathematical reasoning capabilities, but existing gains rely heavily on English-centric training resources and benchmarks. As a result, reasoning performance degrades substantially in low-resource languages such as Urdu, where reasoning-oriented datasets and adapted models remain scarce. Urdu lacks both reasoning-oriented resources and models adapted for multi-step mathematical problem solving, limiting the applicability of recent progress to Urdu-speaking users. We address this gap through Riazi-8B, an Urdu mathematical reasoning model developed through a two-step adaptation process comprising continued pre-training on Urdu Wikipedia and supervised fine-tuning on Urdu Chain-of-Thought data derived from GSM8K. We evaluate Riazi-8B on MGSM-Urdu against existing Urdu instruction-tuned models. Our results show consistent improvements in answer correctness, reasoning quality, response completeness, and Urdu generation. Our findings demonstrate that combining Urdu language adaptation with reasoning-focused fine-tuning is an effective strategy for extending mathematical reasoning capabilities to low-resource languages.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.