Qehwa: The First Pashto LLM

Qehwa, developed by Junaid Aslam, is the first dedicated Pakistani Pashto large language model, specifically targeting the Peshawari/KPK dialect. Built on Qwen2.5-7B, it underwent a two-stage training process:

• Continued Pre-Training (CPT): On 3.4 million clean Pakistani Pashto documents.
• Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT): On 126,519 high-quality Peshawari Pashto instruction-response pairs.

Key Capabilities

• Generates responses in pure Peshawari Pashto.
• Responds to English and Urdu instructions in Pashto.
• Facilitates natural Pashto conversation and creative writing.
• Provides information on Islamic topics, KPK history, culture, geography, and Pashtunwali traditions.
• Offers Pashto grammar correction and English to Pashto translation.

Evaluation & Performance

Qehwa was evaluated on a custom benchmark of 150 tests across 15 categories, achieving an overall average accuracy of 85.3%. It demonstrated strong performance in:

• English → Pashto translation: 90%
• Urdu → Pashto translation: 84%
• Health & Daily Life in Pashto: 90%

This model is a significant resource for the 60+ million Pashto speakers, particularly those using the Peshawari dialect, and is released under the Apache 2.0 License.