The SoccerNet 2026 Challenges constitute the sixth annual edition of the SoccerNet open benchmarking effort, dedicated to advancing computer vision research in sports video understanding. This year's challenges span five vision-based tasks: (1) Ball Action Anticipation, predicting the timing and class of ball-related actions within a short future window from a preceding observation window; (2) Player-Centric Ball Action Spotting, temporally localizing and classifying ball-related actions while assigning each action to the acting player through team affiliation and jersey number; (3) Novel View Synthesis, rendering images from unobserved camera poses in multi-view football scenes; (4) Spiideo SoccerNet Synloc, localizing athletes in real-world pitch coordinates from a single calibrated static-camera image; and (5) Visual Question Answering, answering multiple-choice questions about football broadcasts across text, image, and video inputs. For each task, participants were provided with annotated data, a unified evaluation protocol, and a public baseline. This edition saw broad participation, with 427 teams submitting 1,129 entries across the five tasks and 28 teams contributing reviewed technical reports. This paper describes each task and its evaluation protocol, presents the challenge leaderboards, and summarizes the leading submissions, with the aim of documenting the current state of each task as measured on held-out challenge data.
A. Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Haakan Ardo et al.· 0 citations
Stance detection aims to identify whether a text expresses a favorable or opposing attitude toward a given target, and serves as an important task for various downstream applications. Although existing studies have achieved strong performance in monolingual settings, especially in English, many low-resource languages such as Catalan still lack sufficient annotated data for training effective models. Cross-lingual stance detection alleviates this problem by transferring stance knowledge from resource-rich languages to low-resource languages. However, most existing methods mainly rely on semantic alignment between texts and targets, while ignoring the reasoning process required for reliable stance inference. Although Large Language Models provide strong reasoning ability, their high computational cost and inference latency limit practical deployment. To address these limitations, we propose a rationale-guided knowledge distillation framework for cross-lingual stance detection. Specifically, we use Chain-of-Thought prompting to guide Large Language Models in generating informative rationales, and distill the resulting reasoning knowledge into a compact student model. We further design a dual-path distillation mechanism to align rationale-enhanced and rationale-free representations, together with their prediction distributions. In addition, two contrastive learning strategies are introduced to improve stance discrimination. Experiments on multilingual benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms competitive baselines.
Qiuli Zhou, Jingyuan Yao, Shengeng Tang et al.· 0 citations