NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction: Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction. The goal of the challenge participants was to develop automatic saliency map prediction methods for the provided video sequences. The novel dataset of 2,000 diverse videos with an open license was prepared for this challenge. The fixations and corresponding saliency maps were collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking and contain viewing data from over 5,000 assessors. Evaluation was performed on a subset of 800 test videos using generally accepted quality metrics. The challenge attracted over 20 teams making submissions, and 7 teams passed the final phase with code review. All data used in this challenge is made publicly available - https://github.com/msu-video-group/NTIRE26_Saliency_Prediction.

ViSAGE @ NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction

In this report, we present our champion solution for the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction held in conjunction with CVPR 2026. To exploit complementary inductive biases for video saliency, we propose Video Saliency with Adaptive Gated Experts (ViSAGE), a multi-expert ensemble framework. Each specialized decoder performs adaptive gating and modulation to refine spatio-temporal features. The complementary predictions from different experts are then fused at inference. ViSAGE thereby aggregates diverse inductive biases to capture complex spatio-temporal saliency cues in videos. On the Private Test set, ViSAGE ranked first on two out of four evaluation metrics, and outperformed most competing solutions on the other two metrics, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalization ability. Our code has been released at https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ViSAGE.