Harmonizing the Arabic Audio Space with Data Scheduling

Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury

Abstract: Audio large language models (LLMs) enable unified speech understanding and generation, but adapting them to linguistically complex and dialect-rich settings such as Arabic-English remains challenging. We present a controlled study of multi-task instruction tuning for an Arabic-centric audio LLM across generative tasks including ASR and speech and text summarization, and discriminative tasks including dialect and emotion recognition, in a resource-constrained setting. To support end-to-end Arabic speech summarization, we introduce AraMega-SSum, a first speech summarization resource for training and benchmarking Arabic-centric Audio-LLMs. We compare four training strategies (i) Uniform Task Mixing, (ii) Task-Progressive Curriculum (TPC), (iiii) Aligner-Based Diverse Sampling (ADS) for training-time batch construction, and (iv) A two-stage TPC->ADS strategy. Our results show a clear efficiency-robustness trade-off. ADS speeds up early convergence and improves paralinguistic performance, however, it hurts other tasks. A two-stage TPC-> ADS strategy gives the most reliable overall balance across tasks, offering practical guidance for adapting omni audio LLMs to low-resource, dialect-rich environments. We will make AraMega-SSum and all experimental resources publicly available to the community.