Building on the success of previous iterations, the 2026 edition shifts focus toward a updated high-quality dataset from 2025 academic questions
and fully transparent open-source development.
Evaluate the next generation of frontier multimodal models on challenging vision-based exam
problems.
Updated reasoning-intensive data from 2025 academic questions, focusing on diagrams, charts, and technical schematics.
Promoting transparency with fully open-source architectures and reproducible systems.
Official announcement and website launch for the 2026 edition.
Registration opens for all ImageCLEF tasks
(OpenQA) Train & Development dataset release
(OpenQA+MCQ) Test dataset release
Registration closes for all ImageCLEF tasks
Deadline for submitting participant runs
Late registration directly to AI4Media platform
Submission of Participant Papers [CEUR-WS]
Notification of Acceptance for Participant Papers [CEUR-WS]
Camera Ready Copy of Participant Papers [CEUR-WS]
The competition tasks are designed to evaluate the performance of multimodal models on challenging vision-based exam problems.
Given an image of a question with three to five possible answer options, the solution must select the single correct answer.
ClassificationGiven an image of a question without predefined answer options, the solution must generate a free-form textual answer.
GenerativeSubmissions must be reproducible and run within these constraints for the private test set evaluation.
To promote and encourage efficient solutions, the competition has two categories:
Submit JSON predictions only.
Max 20 submissions/day, 200 total.
Overall accuracy and per-language breakdown
| # | Participant | Overall | EN | BG | ZH | HR | IT | SR |
|---|
Overall accuracy and per-language breakdown
| # | Participant | Overall | EN | BG | ZH | HR | IT | SR |
|---|
Generation quality metrics across languages · ranked by COMET overall
| # | Team | COMET | BG | ZH | HR | EN | IT | SR | BLEU | ROUGE-L | METEOR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| COMET per language | Additional metrics | |||||||||||
Generation quality metrics across languages · ranked by COMET overall
| # | Team | COMET | BG | ZH | HR | EN | IT | SR | BLEU | ROUGE-L | METEOR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| COMET per language | Additional metrics | |||||||||||
Papers MUST include references to the ImageCLEF 2026 overview paper and the ImageCLEF 2026 Multimodal Reasoning overview paper.
@inproceedings{ImageCLEF2026,
title = {Overview of ImageCLEF 2026: Multimodal Challenges in Medicine, Science, Agritech, and Security},
author = {Bogdan Ionescu and Henning M{\"u}ller and Dan{-}Cristian Stanciu and Andrei Radu and Radu{-}George Bolborici and Marian Negru and Alexandru{-}Florin Ene and Vlad{-}Mihai Vasilescu and Ana-Antonia Nicolae and Liviu{-}Daniel \c{S}tefan and Mihai{-}Gabriel Constantin and Mihai Dogariu and Alexandra{-}Georgiana Andrei and Hendrik Damm and Tabea M. G. Pakull and Asma {Ben Abacha} and Alba {Garc\'ia Seco de Herrera} and Christoph M. Friedrich and Raphael Br{\"u}ngel and Lea Reinartz and Henning Sch{\"a}fer and Cynthia Sabrina Schmidt and Benjamin Bracke and Praveen Nath and Bahad{\i}r Ery{\i}lmaz and Maja Hjuler and Diandra Fabre and Claire Lemaire and Benjamin Lecouteux and Didier Schwab and Dimitar Dimitrov and Ming Shan Hee and Momina Ahsan and Sarfraz Ahmad and Dimitrina Zlatkova and Georgi Pachov and Zhuohan Xie and Preslav Nakov and Ivan Koychev and Juampablo E. {Heras Rivera} and Daniel K. Low and Wen{-}wai Yim and Jacob Ruzevick and Dan Child and Mehmet Kurt and Zhaoyi Sun and Fei Xia and Meliha Yetisgen and Ahmedkhan Radzhabov and Yuri Prokopchuk and Vassili Kovalev and Dzmitry Karpenka and Steven A. Hicks and Sushant Gautam and Michael A. Riegler and Vajira Thambawita and P\r{a}l Halvorsen and Mohammad {El Sakka} and Josiane Mothe and Alexandra B\u{a}icoianu and Corneliu{-}Nicolae Florea and Mihai Ivanovici},
booktitle = {Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction},
series = {Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference of the CLEF Association (CLEF 2026)},
year = {2026},
month = {September 21--24},
address = {Jena, Germany},
publisher = {Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS},
}
@inproceedings{ImageCLEFMultimodalReasoningTaskOverview2026,
title = {{O}verview of the {I}mage{CLEF} 2026 {T}ask on {M}ultimodal {R}easoning},
author = {Dimitrov, Dimitar and Hee, Ming Shan and Ahsan, Momina and Ahmad, Sarfraz and Zlatkova, Dimitrina and Pachov, Georgi and Xie, Zhuohan and Nakov, Preslav and Koychev, Ivan},
booktitle = {CLEF 2026 Working Notes},
series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
year = {2026},
month = {September 21--24},
address = {Jena, Germany},
publisher = {CEUR-WS.org},
}
Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria
MBZUAI, UAE
MBZUAI, UAE
MBZUAI, UAE
MBZUAI, UAE
Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria
Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria
Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Bulgaria
MBZUAI, UAE