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NeurIPS 2025 Call for Competitions

 

We are glad to announce the nineth edition of the competition track at NeurIPS 2025. Through this call, we solicit competition proposals on topics of interest to the NeurIPS community. 

We especially encourage submissions with a clear scientific question and from fields with a positive societal impact, particularly those leveraging AI to support disadvantaged communities. Besides societal impact, we seek proposals in areas where machine learning can positively advance other scientific, technological, or business domains of relevance to the NeurIPS community. We hope that interesting competitions will attract a significant cross-section of interdisciplinary and diverse communities to our NeurIPS 2025 competition track. 

NeurIPS 2025 will be hosting a Competition Track, with a dedicated workshop for each accepted competition, where results will be presented and discussed by participants and organizers. The Competition Track is currently planned to be held in person at NeurIPS. 

Authors are asked to confirm that their submissions accord with the NeurIPS code of conduct and code of ethics. 

 

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION 

Competition proposals must both be submitted via OpenReview at: 
https://openreview.net/group?id=NeurIPS.cc/2025/Competition_Track  
Note: Newly created profiles in OpenReview can take up to two weeks for approval, please plan accordingly. 

Please carefully follow the following Latex template when preparing proposals. 
https://www.overleaf.com/read/cmyydmzcqpdf#2414af 
Note that the guidelines and template have been updated from last year. 

The main text of the submitted proposal is limited to eight content pages, including all figures and tables. Additional pages containing the team members biography and references do not count as content pages. 

 

REVIEWING AND SELECTION PROCESS   

A competition program committee will be formed, consisting of experts on both machine learning and challenges organization. Each proposal will be reviewed by members of the program committee. The factors that will be considered when evaluating proposals include: 

  • Scientific Relevance and Task(s): Competitions should be motivated by clear scientific questions and curiosity. Impact, originality, and relevance to the NeurIPS community will all be considered. Tasks that include humanitarian and/or positive societal impact are highly encouraged, although other topics relevant to the NeurIPS community are also welcomed. If humanitarian projects are submitted, the involvement of the community in question is strongly desired, and “parachute science” is strongly discouraged. Ethical considerations, including potential risks associated with the task and dataset, should be carefully addressed. 
  • Evaluation Protocol: Feasibility of the task, baseline availability, sufficient data for training and testing algorithms to solve the proposed task, soundness of the evaluation criteria, and clarity and fairness of the competition rules will all be evaluated. Proposals should also address potential feature leakage and ensure the evaluation aligns with real-world task performance. 
  • Logistics: The competition schedule, plan for attracting competition participants, and experience and diversity of the organizers will all be considered. The specific plan for attracting competition participants, including groups under-represented at NeurIPS, will be important during the review process. 

The review process is single-blind, so the submissions should include the organizers’ identities (i.e., not anonymized).  

 

PROCEEDINGS  

Similar to last year, there are two options for accepted competitions in 2025 to submit their post-competition analyses: 

  1. As papers to the 2026 NeurIPS D&B track (next year), which involves a standard paper review process without a guarantee of acceptance. 
  2. Submit to a PMLR volume (e.g., https://proceedings.mlr.press/v220/) dedicated to NeurIPS competitions, where acceptance is guaranteed after a light-weight review.  

  

IMPORTANT DATES (anywhere on earth) 

  • Competition proposal submission deadline: April 13, 2025 
  • Acceptance notification: May 11, 2025 
  • 2025 Competition track: December 6-7, 2025 

  

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS 

Competition organizers should propose a timeline for running the competition to ensure participants have enough time to contribute high-quality entries. It is recommended that competitions be launched in May and completed by the end of October 2025 at the absolute latest. 

Competition organizers that require help or suggestions regarding competition platforms for running the competition can contact the competition chairs for advice. 

  

COMPETITION CHAIRS 

Jes Frellsen, DTU 
Kun Zhang, CMU and MBZUAI 
Tao Qin, Microsoft Research 

Contact:  competition-chairs