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How Foundation Models Behave for Arabic Image Captioning?

Image captioning plays a crucial role in numerous applications, including educational systems. However, ensuring caption quality remains a significant challenge, particularly for morphologically rich, low-resource languages such as Arabic. We investigate an evaluation of Arabic image captioning using state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models. We systematically assess the performance of leading models—Gemini, Gemma, LLaMA, and Fanar. Our evaluation framework employs a diverse set of metrics spanning rule-based, learnable, visually-grounded, and LLM-based approaches to capture semantic accuracy, linguistic fluency, and hallucination detection. Experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets: Flickr8k-Arabic and JEEM. Our findings reveal significant performance variations across models and evaluation metrics, highlighting the need for Arabic-specific optimization in multimodal architectures.