NeurIPS 2021 Competitions

Douwe Kiela, Barbara Caputo, Marco Ciccone

Today, we introduce the competitions that have been accepted at NeurIPS 2021. We selected a total of 23 competitions out of 46 very strong proposals, covering a wide range of areas and subdisciplines. We are super excited about this year’s program and the set of challenges it presents. The competitions are now officially open and ready for the community to participate. Please check the NeurIPS website for full competition details.

This year will mark the fifth year of NeurIPS having a dedicated competitions track. Whether this is the first time you’re hearing about NeurIPS competitions or you’re a competition grandmaster, we hope you’ll take some time to look over this years’ exciting set of competitions, and wholeheartedly encourage you to participate! Competitions are lots of fun: they’re great for connecting to a community of like-minded researchers, excellent for learning and resume building, and will allow you to use your skills to have real-world impact on important and challenging problems.

The program includes exciting competitions ranging from zero-resource speech, to interactive grounded language understanding, to designing new catalysts for renewable energy, to name just a few. The program includes a wide variety of domains, with some focusing more on applications and others trying to unify fields, or focusing on technical challenges like understanding the fidelity of approximate inference. We hope that the broad program makes it so that anyone who wants to work on a competition can find something to their liking.

Without further ado, the list of accepted competitions is as follows:

• BASALT: A MineRL Competition on Solving Human-Judged Tasks
• Billion-Scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Challenge
• Diamond: A MineRL Competition on Training Sample-Efficient Agents
• Enhanced Zero-Resource Speech Challenge 2021: Language Modelling from Speech and Images
• Evaluating Approximate Inference in Bayesian Deep Learning
• HEAR 2021: Holistic Evaluation of Audio Representations
• IGLU: Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment
• Image similarity challenge
• Learning By Doing: Controlling a Dynamical System using Control Theory, Reinforcement Learning, or Causality
• Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization
• Machine Learning for Mechanical Ventilation Control
• MetaDL: Few Shot Learning Competition with Novel Datasets from Practical Domains
• Multimodal Single-Cell Data Integration
• Open Catalyst Challenge
• Real Robot Challenge II
• Reconnaissance Blind Chess
• Shifts Challenge: Robustness and Uncertainty under Real-World Distributional Shift
• The AI Driving Olympics
• The BEETL 2021 Competition: Benchmarks for EEG Transfer Learning
• The NetHack Challenge
• Traffic4cast 2021 — Temporal and Spatial Few-Shot Transfer Learning in Traffic Map Movie Forecasting
• VisDA21: Visual Domain Adaptation
• WebQA Competition

For full details, see: https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2021/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. We’re very grateful to our program committee for providing very high-quality reviews.

Please feel free to reach out to neurips-2021-demo-competitions-chairs@googlegroups.com if you have any questions! We look forward to seeing the competition outcomes at the conference!

Douwe, Barbara & Marco