We introduce OpenEvents V1, a large-scale benchmark dataset designed to advance event-centric vision-language understanding. Unlike conventional image captioning and retrieval datasets that focus on surface-level descriptions, OpenEvents V1 dataset emphasizes contextual and temporal grounding through three primary tasks: (1) generating rich, event-aware image captions, (2) retrieving event-relevant news articles from image queries, and (3) retrieving event-relevant images from narrative-style textual queries. The dataset comprises over 200,000 news articles and 400,000 associated images sourced from CNN and The Guardian, spanning diverse domains and time periods. We provide extensive baseline results and standardized evaluation protocols for all tasks. OpenEvents V1 establishes a robust foundation for developing multimodal AI systems capable of deep reasoning over complex real-world events. The dataset is publicly available at https://ltnghia.github.io/eventa/openevents-v1.

The Event-Enriched Image Analysis (EVENTA) Grand Challenge, hosted at ACM Multimedia 2025, introduces the first large-scale benchmark for event-level multimodal understanding. Traditional captioning and retrieval tasks largely focus on surface-level recognition of people, objects, and scenes, often overlooking the contextual and semantic dimensions that define real-world events. EVENTA addresses this gap by integrating contextual, temporal, and semantic information to capture the who, when, where, what, and why behind an image. Built upon the OpenEvents V1 dataset, the challenge features two tracks: Event-Enriched Image Retrieval and Captioning, and Event-Based Image Retrieval. A total of 45 teams from six countries participated, with evaluation conducted through Public and Private Test phases to ensure fairness and reproducibility. The top three teams were invited to present their solutions at ACM Multimedia 2025. EVENTA establishes a foundation for context-aware, narrative-driven multimedia AI, with applications in journalism, media analysis, cultural archiving, and accessibility. Further details about the challenge are available at the official homepage: https://ltnghia.github.io/eventa/eventa-2025.