Public scores vs. final ranking, and required pre-deadline steps (VOTS2026)

[Alexandru Galea]

Hi all,

A few clarifications I couldn't find in the rules, ahead of the VOTS2026 deadline:

The participation rules say submission results are not public during the challenge and leaderboards appear only after analysis — yet participants receive "Public VOTS2026 performance" scores by email after each submission. Do these public scores feed the official final ranking, or is the final ranking computed separately (e.g. on the full/sequestered set, revealed after the competition)?

For a participant with several registered trackers, is each ranked independently on its most recent valid submission? Is there anything one must do to indicate the intended entry?

Could you confirm the mandatory pre-deadline steps for a submission to count — in particular whether a persistent tracker-code repository link is required, and whether the short/long tracker descriptions submitted via the form are sufficient?

Thanks!

[Pavel Tokmakov]

Hi Alexandru,

please find the responses below:

The main VOTS2026 tracking by segmentation sub-challenge reports results to the authors on the VOTS2025 dataset, but the winner will be determined by the performance on the new dataset (sequestered at this point). For the other sub-challenges, the final ranking results are the ones sent to the authors.

Registering several trackers is allowed, but the trackers should be sufficiently different between each other. The difference should be explained in the short/long tracker description. Since the same author may work on different trackers, thus contribute with several different trackers, each tracker is treated as an independent entry. If that's not the case, the authors should keep only their main tracker instance and retract the other "test"-submissions (indicate in description).

The persistent link is required at submission (can be password protected) in case the VOTS committee would like to verify any results. In case the tracker wins the challenge, the link has to be made publicly available by the workshop date -- if the paper is under review at a major conference, we could extend the deadline for the review period, but then the code should be made available.

Some of these points are under "Additional clarifications" on (https://www.votchallenge.net/vots2026/participation.html). We also recommend to check "Tracker registration checklist" on the same page.

Best,

Pavel