Participation

Development and Submission

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to participate in the challenge:

Clone the stir-challenge-2026-inference repository.
Follow our guideline outlined in the repo’s readme to integrate and package your model inside a Docker image.
Test your model qualitatively using our provided validation sequences.
Upload your Docker image to any file-sharing service (e.g., Google Drive, Synapse, etc.) and share the link with us in the submission email following the instructions below.

Important Rules for Submission

Do not modify any existing dataset or inference pipeline files in the inference repository. Your model must be contained in a single file, following the format of the existing sample models. You are allowed and encouraged to modify the pyproject.toml file to add dependencies. Any changes to the core files of the framework may result in rejection of your submission.

Evaluation Framework

We will use stir-challenge-2026-metrics to access your model’s outputs and benchmark its performance.

Validation

For validation, there is two alternatives:

Qualitative evaluation on the validation split of the STIR 2026 dataset. We highly recommend using this for sanity checking the docker container, probing its memory usage (we ensure that there is a 30 seconds video in the validation split which is the longest of our sequences in the test split) and visually analyzing the results.
Quantitative evalation using the previous years’ data and framework (STIRC 2024, STIRC 2025). Please note that you will need to follow the corresponding guidelines and adapt your model to the old framework as well.

vRAM Constraints: The evaluations will be performed on a single, independent, workstation equipped with an RTX6000 Ada GPU (48GB vRAM). The longest of our sequences is 30 seconds. Please consider this when developing your model.

Email Template

Visit our Synapse page to participate and obtain further details on submission. Email challenge.stir@gmail.com with a link to download your container. Attach the signed form EndoVis Participant Form if you have not already done so. Teams are limited to one submission per component. A video and report will be due. (see How To Participate for instructions)

**Subject line**

STIR Submission <teamname> <submissiontype>

**Body**

Team Name:
Team Members:
Team Contact Email:
Link to Docker image and rundocker.sh for submission: (for each submission)
Type of Submission: (Any of: 2D, 3D, 2D+latency/3D+latency)

Questions

Please direct your questions to the synapse forum if they can be relevant to other participants, or challenge.stir@gmail.com if not.

STIR Challenge