Challenge Objective and Tracks

The challenge addresses critical industrial needs for reliable anomaly detection under varying conditions and with limited data. We aim to bridge academic research with industrial requirements to develop solutions directly applicable to manufacturing, retail logistics, and beyond. The challenge hosts two individual tracks:

• Industrial Track: MVTec AD 2 

• Retail Track: Kaputt 2

Participants can choose a single track or enter both in two separate submissions. These challenge tracks aim to advance existing anomaly detection literature and increase its adaptation in real-world settings. We invite the global community of innovators, researchers, and technology enthusiasts: Engage with these challenges and contribute towards advancing anomaly detection technologies in real-world scenarios.

From April 1st to May 14th (AOE), 2026, the global community will showcase its ideas on how to solve these challenges in visual anomaly detection.

You will find a detailed description of the individual tracks below, explaining the datasets used, the requirements for model design, the evaluation protocol, and points of contact, respectively. When in doubt about the participation and submission guidelines, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

Prizes

Participate for a chance to win prizes!

Apart from model performance, computational efficiency and innovative method design will be rewarded.
For complete details on prize categories, eligibility criteria, and award amounts, please refer to the official VAND 4.0 Challenge rules.

Prize Categories per Track

• Best Performance: Submission with overall best performance. ($3000 USD, prize provider: Amazon)

• Best Performance runner-up: Submission with the overall second best performance. ($750 USD, prize provider: Voxel51)

• Best Efficiency: Submission with best efficiency-performance trade-off. (appr. $6000 USD, prize provider: Intel)

• Best Performance Zero-Shot/Off-the-shelf VLM: Submission with overall best performance under the Zero-Shot (Industrial Track)/ Off-the-shelf VLM (Retail Track) Setting. ($3000 USD, prize provider: Amazon).

• Best Paper: Jury prize for an outstanding idea or methodological design. (appr. $400 USD, prize provider: MVTec)

General Aspects

Important Dates

• Release of Detailed Track Descriptions: March 25th

• Challenge time: April 1st – May 14th (Anywhere on Earth)

• Submission Deadline: May 14th 23:59pm AOE

• Results Announcement: May 21st

• VAND4.0 workshop @CVPR26: June 3rd/4th
  Winners will have the chance to present their solution as a short video (5 min).
  Submission deadline for the video: May 28th (video presentation of the solution required to be eligible for prizes)
  
  

Model development

Participants are encouraged to explore and leverage any state-of-the-art anomaly detection, machine learning and vision(-language) models without limitations. Creativity and originality in model architecture and training methodology are strongly encouraged as long as they fulfil the track-specific requirements.

Datasets

For the Industrial Track, the MVTec AD 2 dataset will be used. Its design allows for evaluating models under real-world distribution shifts induced by changes in lighting conditions.

For the Retail Track, the Kaputt2 dataset will be used. The dataset is an extension of the Kaputt dataset released in 2025, illustrating scientific challenges for defect detection arising in retail logistics scenarios such as heavy pose and appearance variation. Kaputt2 will be released and made available at challenge start (April 1st).

Resources

• Anomalib GitHub

• Discord Channel #cvpr-challenge-vand4-0 

• Kaputt dataset

• MVTec Datasets

Participation Guidelines

This challenge is open to individuals, teams, and academic and corporate entities worldwide. Submission requirements, evaluation metrics, and additional eligibility criteria — in particular with respect to prize eligibility — are detailed in the official rules which can be downloaded below.

VAND 4.0 Official Challenge Rules

Official Challenge Rules are available for download via the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PWFG6QLaDV3ijw6HWB7rTLKiENrJwTvU/view?usp=sharing

Detailed Track Information

VAND 4.0 Industrial Track - Technical Guidelines

Technical Guidelines for the Retail Track are availbale for download via the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O9JCLXAA1lr9x8rkB0MF-YUEr843WJDg/view?usp=sharing

VAND 4.0 Retail Track - Technical Guidelines

Technical Guidelines for the Retail Track are availbale for download via the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tbrw-P8BsYtETm1EmeXlK8RdgZVGBpj1/view?usp=sharing

Challenge Organizers

You can reach out to the Challenge Organizers via: 

vand4-0-challenge@googlegroups.com

Please use this email for any questions around the challenge and restrain from contacting organizers individually since your request might not be answered in this case.

Challenge Sponsors