  While significant progress has been made in benchmarking Large Language
Models (LLMs) across various tasks, there is a lack of comprehensive evaluation
of their abilities in responding to multi-turn instructions in less-commonly
tested languages like Arabic. Our paper offers a detailed examination of the
proficiency of open LLMs in such scenarios in Arabic. Utilizing a customized
Arabic translation of the MT-Bench benchmark suite, we employ GPT-4 as a
uniform evaluator for both English and Arabic queries to assess and compare the
performance of the LLMs on various open-ended tasks. Our findings reveal
variations in model responses on different task categories, e.g., logic vs.
literacy, when instructed in English or Arabic. We find that fine-tuned base
models using multilingual and multi-turn datasets could be competitive to
models trained from scratch on multilingual data. Finally, we hypothesize that
an ensemble of small, open LLMs could perform competitively to proprietary LLMs
on the benchmark.
