This paper presents the MAHED 2025 Shared Task on Multimodal Detection of Hope and Hate Emotions in Arabic Content, comprising three subtasks: (1) text-based classification of Arabic content into hate and hope, (2) multi-task learning for joint prediction of emotions, offensive content, and hate speech, and (3) multimodal detection of hateful content in Arabic memes. We provide three high-quality datasets totaling over 22,000 instances sourced from social media platforms, annotated by native Arabic speakers with Cohen’s Kappa exceeding 0.85. Our evaluation attracted 46 leaderboard submissions from participants, with systems leveraging Arabic-specific pre-trained language models (AraBERT, MARBERT), large language models (GPT-4, Gemini), and multimodal fusion architectures combining CLIP vision encoders with Arabic text models. The best-performing systems achieved macro F1-scores of 0.723 (Task 1), 0.578 (Task 2), and 0.796 (Task 3), with top teams employing ensemble methods, class-weighted training, and OCR-aware multimodal fusion. Analysis reveals persistent challenges in dialectal robustness, minority class detection for hope speech, and highlights key directions for future Arabic content moderation research.

This study evaluates three approaches—instruction prompting of large language models (LLMs), instruction fine-tuning of LLMs, and transformer-based pretrained models on emotion detection in Arabic social media text. We compare pretrained transformer models like AraBERT, CaMelBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa with instruction prompting with advanced LLMs like GPT-4o, Gemini, Deepseek, and Fanar, and instruction fine-tuning approaches with LLMs like Llama 3.1, Mistral, and Phi. With a highly preprocessed dataset of 10,000 labeled Arabic tweets with overlapping emotional labels, our findings reveal that transformer-based pretrained models outperform instruction prompting and instruction fine-tuning approaches. Instruction prompts leverage general linguistic skills with maximum efficiency but fall short in detecting subtle emotional contexts. Instruction fine-tuning is more specific but trails behind pretrained transformer models. Our findings establish the need for optimized instruction-based approaches and underscore the important role played by domain-specific transformer architectures in accurate Arabic emotion detection.