Soro: A Lightweight Foundation Model and Chatbot for Tajik

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 9 Apr 2026] Soro: A Lightweight Foundation Model and Chatbot for Tajik Stanislav Liashkov, Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde, Azizjon Azimi, Khushbakht Shaymardonov, Shuhratjon Khalitbekov, Bonu Boboeva We present Soro, a family of Tajik-specialized conversational large language models (LLMs) designed for real-world deployment under tight compute and connectivity constraints in Tajikistan. Starting from open-weight Gemma 3 checkpoints, we perform Tajik-only continual pretraining on a curated 1.9-billion-token corpus spanning filtered web text, PDF documents, and curriculum-aligned educational materials, followed by supervised instruction tuning on 40K Tajik teacher-style examples. To enable rigorous evaluation despite the limited coverage of Tajik in standard benchmarks, we introduce a suite of Tajik benchmarks covering general knowledge, linguistic competence, and school- and university entrance-exam domains, and we open-source them on Hugging Face. Across these Tajik benchmarks, Soro substantially outperforms same-size Gemma 3 baselines while retaining strong English performance on standard datasets. We further show that FP8 and INT4 quantization of Soro preserves most Tajik-language gains while reducing memory requirements for edge deployment, supporting an ongoing education-sector pilot and planned scale-out across schools in Tajikistan. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2605.27379 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.27379v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.27379 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Bonu Boboeva [view email] [v1] Thu, 9 Apr 2026 15:04:32 UTC (3,650 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)