Welcome to ImageEval 2026

ImageEval 2026: Cultural Grounding in Arabic Multimodal Generation and Understanding is a shared task on culturally grounded Arabic multimodal AI. The task suite evaluates visual question answering, image-grounded hallucination detection, and cultural accuracy evaluation for text-to-image generation.

The shared task focuses on Arabic language varieties and culturally specific visual content from the MENA region, with dedicated tracks for participants to build, evaluate, and compare multimodal systems.

Tasks

Task 1: AynVQA - Culturally Grounded Arabic Visual Question Answering and Hallucination Detection.
Task 2: CRAI-Bench - Cultural Accuracy Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation.

Recent Updates

July 15, 2026: Deadlines extended. The evaluation cycle now runs August 2 to August 7, with shared task papers due August 19. See the updated Important Dates.
June 8, 2026: Task 1 information, Git repository, and Codabench links have been updated.
May 22, 2026: Task website, training/development data, and evaluation scripts released.
Join our Slack: Hop into the ImageEval Slack channel for announcements, deadlines, and discussion.
Submission guidelines: Paper and submission guidance is available for participating teams.

Important Dates

May 22, 2026: Release of task website, training/dev data, and evaluation scripts
~~July 20, 2026~~ → August 2, 2026: Beginning of the evaluation cycle (test sets release)
August 7, 2026: End of the evaluation cycle (run submission)
~~July 30, 2026~~ → August 9, 2026: Leaderboard release
~~August 15, 2026~~ → August 19, 2026: Shared task papers due
~~August 25, 2026~~ → August 30, 2026: Notification of acceptance
~~September 5, 2026~~ → September 10, 2026: Camera-ready papers due
October 24-29, 2026: ArabicNLP conference

Contact

For questions related to ImageEval 2026, contact the organizers at imageeval2026@gmail.com.

Organizers

Samir Abdaljalil, Texas A&M University
Firoj Alam, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Ahlam Bashiti, Birzeit University
Farina Amir, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Nadir Durrani, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Fahim Dalvi, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Basel Mousi, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Zien Sheikh Ali, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU
Erchin Serpedin, Texas A&M University
Hasan Kurban, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Mustafa Jarrar, Sina Lab, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Md Arid Hasan, University of Toronto