Announcing the NeurIPS 2023 Competitions

By Marco Ciccone, Tao Qin, Jake Albrecht

Today, we introduce the competitions that have been accepted at NeurIPS 2023 Competition Track. It seemed especially challenging this year given the number of quality submissions and the limited number that could be accepted.  We selected a total of 20 very strong proposals, covering a wide range of areas and subdisciplines.  Some of the competitions are completely new, others are familiar to the NeurIPS community.  The selected competitions are now official and ready for the community to participate in. Please check the NeurIPS website for full competition details.

This year will mark the seventh year of NeurIPS having a dedicated competition track. Whether this is the first time you’re heard about NeurIPS competitions or you’re a grandmaster, this year’s cohort has something to offer for a variety of backgrounds, skill levels, and domain knowledge.  We hope you’ll take some time to look over this year’s exciting set of competitions, and encourage you to participate! 

Competitions have a valuable place in research and in solving complex problems.

As a participant, you will benefit from being exposed to a vibrant community! Indeed, they’re great for connecting to like-minded researchers, excellent for learning and resume building, and allow you to use your skills to have a real-world impact on important and challenging problems. After the challenges are complete, we hope that you continue collaborating with your former competitors to advance solutions for these important problems.

We are also excited to share that, starting from this year, competition reports co-authored by both organizers and participants will be subject to new publication requirements. To improve scientific rigor, transparency, and reproducibility, accepted competitions in 2023 will be required to submit their post-competition analyses as papers to the 2024 NeurIPS D&B track (next year). 

The NeurIPS 2023 program includes the following exciting competitions:

• Special Topics in Machine Learning
  • NeurIPS 2023 Machine Unlearning Competition
  • Privacy Preserving Federated Learning Document VQA
  • Causal Structure Learning from Event Sequences and Prior Knowledge
  • Practical Vector Search Challenge 2023
• Natural Language Processing and LLMs
  • NeurIPS Large Language Model Efficiency Challenge: 1 LLM + 1GPU + 1Day
  • TDC 2023 (LLM Edition): The Trojan Detection Challenge
• Machine Learning for Physical and Life Sciences
  • Weather4cast 2023 – Data Fusion for Quantitative Hi-Res Rain Movie Prediction under Spatio-temporal Shifts
  • Foundation Model Prompting for Medical Image Classification Challenge 2023
  • The Dynamic Sensorium competition for predicting large-scale mouse visual cortex activity from videos
  • Single-cell perturbation prediction: generalizing experimental interventions to unseen contexts
  • Open Catalyst Challenge
• Multi-Agent Learning
  • The NeurIPS 2023 Neural MMO Challenge: Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning and Curriculum Generation
  • Lux AI Challenge Season 2 NeurIPS Edition
  • Melting Pot Contest
• Urban and Environmental Challenges
  • The CityLearn Challenge 2023
• Autonomous Systems and Task Execution
  • The HomeRobot Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation Challenge
  • ROAD-R 2023: the Road Event Detection with Requirements Challenge
  • The Robot Air Hockey Challenge: Robust, Reliable, and Safe Learning Techniques for Real-world Robotics
  • MyoChallenge 2023: Towards Human-Level Dexterity and Agility
  • Train Offline, Test Online: A Democratized Robotics Benchmark

For full details, see https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2023/CompetitionTrack. 

We are very grateful to the colleagues that helped us with reviewing and selecting the competition proposals for this year.  We congratulate all the authors on their accepted proposals, and we thank everyone who submitted a proposal for their fantastic work. 

Please feel free to reach out to competition-chairs@neurips.cc if you have any questions or suggestions. 

Good luck to our organizers and participants; we look forward to seeing the competition outcomes at the conference!