ImageEval 2026: Culturally Grounded Arabic Multimodal Evaluation

Samir Abdaljalil, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Ahlam Bashiti, Farina Amir, Md Arid Hasan, Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Zien Sheikh Ali, Erchin Serpedin, Hasan Kurban, Mustafa Jarrar, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam


Abstract
We present an overview of the **ImageEval 2026** shared task on culturally grounded Arabic multimodal evaluation. It includes two tasks: (i) **AynVQA**, covering spoken visual question answering and image-grounded hallucination detection in English and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and (ii) **CRAI-Bench**, evaluating the cultural accuracy of text-to-image generation. A total of 14 teams participated in the test phase, with 12 teams submitting system description papers. Participating systems used a range of approaches, including zero-shot prompting, fine-tuning of vision-language models, speech-recognition pipelines, ensembling, and score calibration. We describe the task setup, datasets, evaluation procedure, and participating systems, and summarize the main results across the different tracks. All datasets and evaluation scripts from the shared task are released to the research community. The shared task highlights challenges in culturally grounded multimodal evaluation, particularly for Arabic speech and image-text reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.84
Volume:
Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Tamer Elsayed, Houda Bouamor, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Hend Al-Khalifa, Ahmed Abdelali, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Abdellah El Mekki, Kareem Darwish, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Hamzah Luqman, Salam Khalifa, Samar Magdy, Zaid Alyafeai, Injy Hamed, Wajdi Zaghouani, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
ArabicNLP
SIG:
SIGARAB
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
667–680
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.84/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Samir Abdaljalil, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Ahlam Bashiti, Farina Amir, Md Arid Hasan, Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Zien Sheikh Ali, Erchin Serpedin, Hasan Kurban, Mustafa Jarrar, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, and Firoj Alam. 2026. ImageEval 2026: Culturally Grounded Arabic Multimodal Evaluation. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 667–680, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ImageEval 2026: Culturally Grounded Arabic Multimodal Evaluation (Abdaljalil et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.84.pdf