ZAHIRA BOULANOUAR at NakbaArchiveClassifier Shared Task: Detecting Infrastructure Destruction in Gaza with a ConvNeXt Ensemble

Zahira Boulanouar


Abstract
We present our third-place submission to the Nakba Image Classification Shared Task at LREC-COLING 2026, which requires binary classification of Instagram images from Gaza into destruction (damaged or destroyed infrastructure) versus not_destruction. Our system fine-tunes a ConvNeXt-Tiny backbone within a five-fold stratified cross-validation framework, combining Focal Loss, weighted random sampling, exponential moving average (EMA) weight stabilization, test-time augmentation (TTA), and out-of-fold (OOF) decision threshold calibration. Our system achieves an official test macro F1 of 0.8893 and 90.05% accuracy, placing third among all participants and within 0.02 F1 of the winning system (0.91), demonstrating that a 28M-parameter convolutional architecture with principled training strategies is highly competitive with much larger models.
Anthology ID:
2026.nakbanlp-1.46
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Amal Haddad, Serin Atiani, Shadi Abudalfa, Terry Regier, Paul Rayson, Khalil Sima’an, Camille Mansour
Venues:
NakbaNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
294–297
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nakbanlp-46
DOI:
10.63317/2x7rcigppzib
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zahira Boulanouar. 2026. ZAHIRA BOULANOUAR at NakbaArchiveClassifier Shared Task: Detecting Infrastructure Destruction in Gaza with a ConvNeXt Ensemble. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026, pages 294–297, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
ZAHIRA BOULANOUAR at NakbaArchiveClassifier Shared Task: Detecting Infrastructure Destruction in Gaza with a ConvNeXt Ensemble (Boulanouar, NakbaNLP 2026)
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