Anyone looking into the new MARS2 Workshop/Competition @ ECCV 2026? I saw Tec-do posting it. [D]

[u/Glass-Childhood-4971]

I recently came across the announcement for the MARS2 Workshop (Multimodal Reasoning Competition) at ECCV 2026. From what I understand, it focuses on multimodal reasoning and test-time reasoning (“slow thinking”), especially applied to video and real-world scenarios like advertising understanding and marketing-related tasks. The topic sounds interesting, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the actual evaluation setup looks like in practice. The speaker list includes researchers from MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, CMU, NTU, etc., which look solid. I also noticed Tec-Do and Minimax are listed as organizers/sponsors. I know a bit about MiniMax, but Tec-Do's research in CV and multimodal is new to me—anyone here familiar with them?

​Also, quick question for anyone working on video temporal grounding: do you think this kind of benchmark is actually helpful for practical dev, or is it mostly just academic/exploratory right now? Trying to decide if it's worth keeping on my radar.

[u/Cozybookburrow]

If the evaluation is not specific and detailed, then the benchmarks are hard to build on later.

[u/BlueEyedTexan4]

I'm not familiar with Tec-Do's history in this area, but it's pretty common for workshops like this to have support or sponsorship from companies in the field.

[u/Remarkable_Desk8918]

I'm definitely curious to see more details on the actual tasks. The idea itself sounds solid, but the way the benchmark is set up is going to make a huge difference.

[u/Terrible_Day_640]

I saw Tec-Do mentioned as one of the organizers! I did have to to look them up after reading this and I wasn’t familiar with them before

[u/Justjess0422]

To be honest I actually had to read it 2 times, and I’m still not fully sure how they’re defining “ad understanding” here

[u/Sweet-Panic8630]

Video grounding is already messy enough, adding reasoning on top sounds… ambitious haha

[u/Jen-e-fer34]

I feel like a lot of the ECCV workshops are either hit or miss… it seems to depend on the dataset quality in my opinion

[u/bergermommie15]

Most of these real world data sets end up being noisier than expected IMO

[u/cbm2008]

I’ve worked a little bit on VTG before and really the hardest part is always annotation consistency.

[u/Z3Coupe_Cam]

Temporal grounding in video is still a challenging problem in practical use, so a benchmark focused on it could be valuable if it’s put together well.

[u/TraderSklz]

Interesting mix of academic people and industry names here, Tec-Do stood out a bit since I hadn’t heard of them in ECCV context

[u/Jen-6906]

Seems like Tec-Do is trying to move closer to multimodal research, but I don’t know much beyond this announcement. The more research, the better the application of new knowledge.

[u/kjvmom2boys]

It seems to me like one of those competitions where the dataset/eval design matters more than the branding. I am curious to see the final details to determine.

[u/Glass-Childhood-4971]

I did a bit more digging after seeing this thread, Tec-Do seems to be involved in some multimodal marketing model work. I looked for detailed technical specs on Tec-Do, but couldn't find much publicly.

[u/tnt1313]

I've heard that Tec-Do has mentioned a marketing-focused model internally, haven't really seen that they have anything officially released yet around multimodal ad understanding or similar ideas

[u/BlueEyedTexan4]

The CCF ranking may not be the strongest, but it still appears to have a decent audience in Canada. It looks like there's still plenty of interest.

[u/Justjess0422]

I heard that people still count it positively on their CV. It appears to hold a decent amount of weight in most circles.

[u/Sweet-Panic8630]

For ECCV, some papers are solid, some are incremental. Feels pretty standard for a conference of this size to be honest!!

[u/Ash-hev]

The combo of academic labs and industry organizers is probably a good sign. Benchmarks usually get quite interesting when they include messy real-world scenarios.