Soro: A Lightweight Foundation Model and Chatbot for Tajik

Researchers have introduced Soro, a family of lightweight large language models specialized for the Tajik language, designed to operate under tight computational and connectivity constraints. Developed from Gemma 3, Soro is poised to drive digital transformation in Tajikistan's education sector through edge deployment.
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
Title:Soro: A Lightweight Foundation Model and Chatbot for Tajik
View PDFAbstract: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.
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