CfP: ACM Multimedia 2026 Grand Challenge "MultiMediate"

[Philipp Müller]

== Call for Participation in ACM MM’26 Grand Challenge “MultiMediate” ==

== https://multimediate-challenge.org/ ==

== Challenge Description ==

MultiMediate’26 focuses on the task of generalizable multimodal engagement estimation across cultures, social situations, and age groups. As in previous years, the challenge covers a unique combination of training and test data from diverse cultural backgrounds, including Japanese, Chinese, German, Arabic, Indonesian, and French speakers, as well as different interaction situations (group vs. dyadic). This year, the scope of MultiMediate will be further expanded by incorporating a dataset of child-child and child-robot interactions. In addition to engagement estimation, we continue to invite submissions to popular tasks from previous iterations of the challenge: eye contact detection, bodily behaviour recognition, backchannel detection. 

== Datasets & Evaluation Protocol ==

Training datasets for all tasks are available from our website. We additionally provide baseline implementations along with pre-computed features to minimise the overhead for participants. Test sets will be released two weeks before the challenge deadline. Participants will in turn submit their predictions for evaluation against ground truth on our servers.

== How to Participate ==

Instructions are available at https://multimediate-challenge.org/ 

Paper submission deadline: 18 June 2026

== Organisers ==

Philipp Müller (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)

Marius Funk (Augsburg University, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

Daksitha Withanage Don (Augsburg University)

Shogo Okada (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

Elisabeth André (Augsburg University)

Victor Oei (University of Stuttgart)

Andreas Bulling (University of Stuttgart)

Michal Balazia (INRIA Sophia Antipolis)
François Brémond (INRIA Sophia Antipolis)