In this competition, participants will address two fundamental causal challenges in machine learning in the context of education using time-series data. The first is to identify the causal relationships between different constructs, where a construct is defined as the smallest element of learning. The second challenge is to predict the impact of learning one construct on the ability to answer questions on other constructs. Addressing these challenges will enable optimisation of students' knowledge acquisition, which can be deployed in a real edtech solution impacting millions of students. Participants will run these tasks in an idealised environment with synthetic data and a real-world scenario with evaluation data collected from a series of A/B tests.

Human intelligence has the remarkable ability to quickly adapt to new tasks and environments. Starting from a very young age, humans acquire new skills and learn how to solve new tasks either by imitating the behavior of others or by following provided natural language instructions. To facilitate research in this direction, we propose IGLU: Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment.The primary goal of the competition is to approach the problem of how to develop interactive embodied agents that learn to solve a task while provided with grounded natural language instructions in a collaborative environment. Understanding the complexity of the challenge, we split it into sub-tasks to make it feasible for participants. This research challenge is naturally related, but not limited, to two fields of study that are highly relevant to the NeurIPS community: Natural Language Understanding and Generation (NLU/G) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Therefore, the suggested challenge can bring two communities together to approach one of the important challenges in AI. Another important aspect of the challenge is the dedication to perform a human-in-the-loop evaluation as a final evaluation for the agents developed by contestants.

Meta-learning aims to leverage the experience from previous tasks to solve new tasks using only little training data, train faster and/or get better performance. The proposed challenge focuses on "cross-domain meta-learning" for few-shot image classification using a novel "any-way" and "any-shot" setting. The goal is to meta-learn a good model that can quickly learn tasks from a variety of domains, with any number of classes also called "ways" (within the range 2-20) and any number of training examples per class also called "shots" (within the range 1-20). We carve such tasks from various "mother datasets" selected from diverse domains, such as healthcare, ecology, biology, manufacturing, and others. By using mother datasets from these practical domains, we aim to maximize the humanitarian and societal impact. The competition is with code submission, fully blind-tested on the CodaLab challenge platform. A single (final) submission will be evaluated during the final phase, using ten datasets previously unused by the meta-learning community. After the competition is over, it will remain active to be used as a long-lasting benchmark resource for research in this field. The scientific and technical motivations of this challenge include scalability, robustness to domain changes, and generalization ability to tasks (a.k.a. episodes) in different regimes (any-way any-shot).

The global trends of urbanization and increased personal mobility force us to rethink the way we live and use urban space. The Traffic4cast competition series tackle this problem in a data driven way, advancing the latest methods in modern machine learning for modelling complex spatial systems over time. This year, our dynamic road graph data combine information from road maps, 10^12 location probe data points, and car loop counters in three entire cities for two years. While loop counters are the most accurate way to capture the traffic volume they are only available in some locations. Traffic4cast 2022 explores models that have the ability to generalize loosely related temporal vertex data on just a few nodes to predict dynamic future traffic states on the edges of the entire road graph. Specifically, in our core challenge we invite participants to predict for three cities the congestion classes known from the red, yellow, or green colouring of roads on a common traffic map for the entire road graph 15min into the future. We provide car count data from spatially sparse loop counters in these three cities in 15min aggregated time bins for one hour prior to the prediction time slot. For our extended challenge participants are asked to predict the actual average speeds on each road segment in the graph 15min into the future.

In this year's Real Robot Challenge, the participants will apply offline reinforcement learning (RL) to robotics datasets and evaluate their policies remotely on a cluster of real TriFinger robots. Usually, experimentation on real robots is quite costly and challenging. For this reason, a large part of the RL community uses simulators to develop and benchmark algorithms. However, insights gained in simulation do not necessarily translate to real robots, in particular for tasks involving complex interaction with the environment. The purpose of this competition is to alleviate this problem by allowing participants to experiment remotely with a real robot - as easily as in simulation. In the last two years, offline RL algorithms became increasingly popular and capable. This year’s Real Robot Challenge provides a platform for evaluation, comparison and showcasing the performance of these algorithms on real-world data. In particular, we propose a dexterous manipulation problem that involves pushing, grasping and in-hand orientation of blocks.

Given the impressive capabilities demonstrated by pre-trained foundation models, we must now grapple with how to harness these capabilities towards useful tasks. Since many such tasks are hard to specify programmatically, researchers have turned towards a different paradigm: fine-tuning from human feedback. The MineRL BASALT competition aims to spur research on this important class of techniques, in the domain of the popular video game Minecraft.The competition consists of a suite of four tasks with hard-to-specify reward functions.We define these tasks by a paragraph of natural language: for example, "create a waterfall and take a scenic picture of it", with additional clarifying details. Participants train a separate agent for each task, using any method they want; we expect participants will choose to fine-tune the provided pre-trained models. Agents are then evaluated by humans who have read the task description. To help participants get started, we provide a dataset of human demonstrations of the four tasks, as well as an imitation learning baseline that leverages these demonstrations.We believe this competition will improve our ability to build AI systems that do what their designers intend them to do, even when intent cannot be easily formalized. This achievement will allow AI to solve more tasks, enable more effective regulation of AI systems, and make progress on the AI alignment problem.

Driving SMARTS is a regular competition designed to tackle problems caused by the distribution shift in dynamic interaction contexts that are prevalent in real-world autonomous driving (AD). The proposed competition supports methodologically diverse solutions, such as reinforcement learning (RL) and offline learning methods, trained on a combination of naturalistic AD data and open-source simulation platform SMARTS. The two-track structure allows focusing on different aspects of the distribution shift. Track 1 is open to any method and will give ML researchers with different backgrounds an opportunity to solve a real-world autonomous driving challenge. Track 2 is designed for strictly offline learning methods. Therefore, direct comparisons can be made between different methods with the aim to identify new promising research directions. The proposed setup consists of 1) realistic traffic generated using real-world data and micro simulators to ensure fidelity of the scenarios, 2) framework accommodating diverse methods for solving the problem, and 3) a baseline method. As such it provides a unique opportunity for the principled investigation into various aspects of autonomous vehicle deployment.

Each panel session is split into four 30-minute blocks composed of a set of lightning talks and a deep dive session related to similar topics. The deep dive will begin immediately after lightning talks and the related Q&A (it might be before the 15 min are over). We will not take any questions via microphone but ask you to use slido (see embedding below or go to https://slido.com and use keyword #neurips22). If you are a presenter or moderator, you should see a zoom link that you can use to join the session for Q&A.

Finally some important don'ts: DO NOT share any zoom or slido information publicly. DO NOT join zoom if you are not presenting or moderating.

Each panel session is split into four 30-minute blocks composed of a set of lightning talks and a deep dive session related to similar topics. The deep dive will begin immediately after lightning talks and the related Q&A (it might be before the 15 min are over). We will not take any questions via microphone but ask you to use slido (see embedding below or go to https://slido.com and use keyword #neurips22). If you are a presenter or moderator, you should see a zoom link that you can use to join the session for Q&A.

Finally some important don'ts: DO NOT share any zoom or slido information publicly. DO NOT join zoom if you are not presenting or moderating.

Each panel session is split into four 30-minute blocks composed of a set of lightning talks and a deep dive session related to similar topics. The deep dive will begin immediately after lightning talks and the related Q&A (it might be before the 15 min are over). We will not take any questions via microphone but ask you to use slido (see embedding below or go to https://slido.com and use keyword #neurips22). If you are a presenter or moderator, you should see a zoom link that you can use to join the session for Q&A.

Finally some important don'ts: DO NOT share any zoom or slido information publicly. DO NOT join zoom if you are not presenting or moderating.

Manual dexterity has been considered one of the critical components for human evolution. The ability to perform movements as simple as holding and rotating an object in the hand without dropping it needs the coordination of more than 35 muscles which, act synergistically or antagonistically on multiple joints. They control the flexion and extension of the joints connecting the bones which in turn allow the manipulation to happen. This complexity in control is markedly different than typical pre-specified movements or torque based controls used in robotics. In this competition - MyoChallenge, participant will develop controllers for a realistic hand to solve a series of dexterous manipulation tasks. Participant will be provided with a physiologically accurate and efficient neuromusculoskeletal human hand model developed in the (free) MuJoCo physics simulator. In addition the provided model has also contact rich capabilities. Participant will be interfacing with a standardized training environment to help build the controllers. The final score will then be based on a environment with unknown parameters.This challenge builds on 3 previous NeurIPS challenge on controlling legs mus- culoskeletal model for locomotion, which attracted about 1300 participants and generated 8000 submissions, which produced 9 academic publications. This chal- lenge will leverage the experience and knowledge from the previous challenges and will further establish neuromusculoskeletal modelling as a benchmarks for the neuromuscular control and machine learning community.In addition of providing challenges for the biomechanics and machine learning community, this challenge will provide new opportunities to explore solutions that will inspire the robotic, medical and rehabilitation fields on one of the most complex dexterous skills humans are able to perform.

The experimental study of neural information processing in the biological visual system is challenging due to the nonlinear nature of neuronal responses to visual input. Artificial neural networks play a dual role in improving our understanding of this complex system, not only allowing computational neuroscientists to build predictive digital twins for novel hypothesis generation in silico, but also allowing machine learning to progressively bridge the gap between biological and machine vision. The mouse has recently emerged as a popular model system to study visual information processing, but no standardized large-scale benchmark to identify state-of-the-art models of the mouse visual system has been established. To fill this gap, we propose the sensorium benchmark competition. We collected a large-scale dataset from mouse primary visual cortex containing the responses of more than 28,000 neurons across seven mice stimulated with thousands of natural images.Using this dataset, we will host two benchmark tracks to find the best predictive models of neuronal responses on a held-out test set. The two tracks differ in whether measured behavior signals are made available or not. We provide code, tutorials, and pre-trained baseline models to lower the barrier for entering the competition. Beyond this proposal, our goal is to keep the accompanying website open with new yearly challenges for it to become a standard tool to measure progress in large-scale neural system identification models of the entire mouse visual hierarchy and beyond.

Each panel session is split into four 30-minute blocks composed of a set of lightning talks and a deep dive session related to similar topics. The deep dive will begin immediately after lightning talks and the related Q&A (it might be before the 15 min are over). We will not take any questions via microphone but ask you to use slido (see embedding below or go to https://slido.com and use keyword #neurips22). If you are a presenter or moderator, you should see a zoom link that you can use to join the session for Q&A.

Finally some important don'ts: DO NOT share any zoom or slido information publicly. DO NOT join zoom if you are not presenting or moderating.

Each panel session is split into four 30-minute blocks composed of a set of lightning talks and a deep dive session related to similar topics. The deep dive will begin immediately after lightning talks and the related Q&A (it might be before the 15 min are over). We will not take any questions via microphone but ask you to use slido (see embedding below or go to https://slido.com and use keyword #neurips22). If you are a presenter or moderator, you should see a zoom link that you can use to join the session for Q&A.

Finally some important don'ts: DO NOT share any zoom or slido information publicly. DO NOT join zoom if you are not presenting or moderating.

Each panel session is split into four 30-minute blocks composed of a set of lightning talks and a deep dive session related to similar topics. The deep dive will begin immediately after lightning talks and the related Q&A (it might be before the 15 min are over). We will not take any questions via microphone but ask you to use slido (see embedding below or go to https://slido.com and use keyword #neurips22). If you are a presenter or moderator, you should see a zoom link that you can use to join the session for Q&A.

Finally some important don'ts: DO NOT share any zoom or slido information publicly. DO NOT join zoom if you are not presenting or moderating.