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NeurIPS 2026 · open competition

EEG/EMG Foundation Challenge 2026.

Biosignal foundation models claim to transfer across subjects, sessions, and devices with limited per-task training.

The NeurIPS 2026 EEG/EMG Foundation Challenge tests this against strong task-specific baselines on four controlled shifts: cross-stimulus, cross-session, cross-device, cross-user.

The four-track design separates two claims usually conflated in the literature: single-task performance and shift robustness.

Top-3 per track are re-run by the organizers on a sealed split. Prize pool: $30.000 across the four tracks. Winners present at the NeurIPS workshop in Sydney.

bash · pip · neuralbench

 1# 1. Install the benchmark stack
 2$ pip install neuralbench eegdash braindecode
 3 
 4# 2. Download and prepare data for Track 1
 5$ neuralbench eeg image --download  # THINGS-EEG2
 6$ neuralbench eeg image --prepare
 7 
 8# 3. Train a baseline
 9$ neuralbench eeg image -m eegnet
10  ↳ Track 1 baseline · NeuralBench v1 · facebookresearch/neuroai

4 decoding tasks

14 public datasets

3700 + subjects

Four tracks, one pipeline

Competition tracks

From cognition to clinic.

One harness, one BIDS-first interface, one reproducibility audit. Holding evaluation fixed lets a per-track score be attributed to the model rather than to the protocol.

SubmissionsSep 16 — Nov 16, 2026 (AoE)

FinalsNeurIPS · Sydney

Prize pool$30.000 ($2.500 / top-3 / track)

Track 01 OPEN

EEG-to-IMG

Decodes which image a subject is viewing from a single EEG epoch, evaluated as ranking against held-out candidates. Targets are frozen DINOv2-giant embeddings, so the difficulty is in the EEG side, not in re-learning the image space. The controlled shift is cross-stimulus: test stimuli are unseen during training.

Visual retrieval DINOv2 RSVP Object viewing

Metric: Top-5 acc · Sponsor: Alljoined Track details →

Track 02 OPEN

BCI decoding

Decodes a cued mental command (motor imagery, mental calculation, word association) from short EEG windows. The controlled shift is cross-session: models train on early sessions and are scored on later sessions of the same subject, with no per-session recalibration allowed.

Motor imagery Mental math Word association Session drift

Metric: Balanced acc · Sponsor: Meta FAIR Brain & AI Track details →

Track 03 OPEN

Sleep onset

Predicts the latency in seconds from recording start to the first stable N2 epoch, on consumer-grade wearable EEG. The controlled shift is to home-wearable channels and montages; precise timing replaces full staging because the wearable signal is too sparse to support per-epoch hypnogram reconstruction.

Sleep onset Wearable EEG Muse Home monitoring

Metric: W-bMAE (s) · Sponsor: InteraXon Track details →

Track 04 OPEN

EMG-to-Pose

Decodes continuous hand pose — the joint angles of a 20-DoF hand skeleton — from wristband surface EMG. Ground truth comes from a 26-camera motion-capture rig. The controlled shift is cross-user: 100+ held-out users vary in forearm anatomy, movement style, and sensor re-placement, so a model that overfits one user's geometry fails the test.

Hand pose Joint angles Wristbands Mocap labels

Metric: Joint angle error (°) · Sponsor: Meta Reality Labs Track details →

Competition window · Sep — Nov 2026

Timeline

One window. More dates after the summer.

The competition runs Sep 16 — Nov 16, 2026 (AoE). The full phase schedule — reproducibility audit, final rankings, prizes, and the NeurIPS workshop — will be announced after the summer.

All timesAnywhere on Earth (AoE)

Daily cap5/day warm-up · 2/day sealed final

AuditTop-3 re-run on sealed split · ±2σ tolerance

InferenceFixed Codabench H100/H200 container · 60 min budget

MoreAudit, prizes & workshop · after summer

Competition OPEN
Submission window
Sep 16 — Nov 16, 2026 (AoE)
Starter kit, baselines, datasets, and the scoring container are released at the start. Public validation and sealed evaluation run across a single window; submissions close Nov 16, 2026 (AoE).

OpensSep 16, 2026

ClosesNov 16, 2026 (AoE)

Repogithub.com/neural-interfaces26
Next TBA
After the summer
Announced later in 2026
Reproducibility audit, final rankings, prizes, and the NeurIPS workshop schedule are released after the summer. Sign up to the mailing list to be notified.

Audit & rankingTo be announced

Prizes & workshopTo be announced

New in 2026 · BIDS-first via EEGDash

Datasets

Four new datasets. One per cognitive domain.

Each track ships with a brand-new corpus, alongside curated seed datasets. For foundation-model pretraining, EEGDash exposes 700+ additional EEG corpora under the same BIDS-first streaming interface.

Visual decoding NEW

Alljoined eval cohort

New 11-subject evaluation cohort recorded with the same Emotiv hardware and natural-images paradigm as the public Alljoined-1.6M corpus. Released by Alljoined.

BCI command NEW

Graz / BrainHero

20 subjects × 6 sessions, mixed Graz and BrainHero paradigms.

Sleep onset NEW

Muse wearable

~1,000-subject home-wearable EEG with n2_onset annotations.

EMG-to-pose NEW

Wristband EMG cohort

New 100-user evaluation cohort recorded with the same wrist-sEMG hardware, gesture stages, and motion-capture paradigm as the public emg2pose corpus. Released by Meta Reality Labs.

ID Name Mod. Subj Hours Ch. SR

things-eeg1 THINGS-EEG1 · Object viewing EEG 50 42h 64 1000 Hz

things-eeg2 THINGS-EEG2 · Object viewing EEG 10 121h 64 1000 Hz

alljoined-1 Alljoined-1 · Natural images EEG 8 12h 64 512 Hz

alljoined-1.6 Alljoined-1.6M · Natural images EEG 20 100h 32 250 Hz

alljoined-eval Alljoined eval · same setup as Alljoined-1.6M NEW · SEP 16 EEG 11 — 32 250 Hz

stieger2021 Stieger 2021 · Continuous MI EEG 62 644h 62 1000 Hz

dreyer2023 Dreyer 2023 · Large MI cohort EEG 87 70h 27 512 Hz

zyma2019 Zyma 2019 · Mental tasks EEG 35 3.5h 19 500 Hz

scherer2015 Scherer 2015 · Individually tuned BCI EEG 9 14h 64 250 Hz

bci-graz Graz/BrainHero · BCI command NEW · SEP 16 EEG 20 80h 64 500 Hz

sleepedf-ext Sleep-EDF Extended Sleep 78 3,600h 2 100 Hz

physionet2018 PhysioNet Challenge 2018 Sleep 1,983 14,200h 6 200 Hz

hmc-sleep HMC Sleep Staging Sleep 151 1200h 4 256 Hz

muse-sleep Muse Sleep-Onset · Wearable NEW · SEP 16 Sleep 1000+ 1000h+ 4 256 Hz

emg2pose emg2pose · EMG hand pose EMG 193 370h 16 2000 Hz

emg2pose-eval emg2pose eval · same setup as emg2pose NEW · SEP 16 EMG 100 — 16 2000 Hz

14 seed datasets + 4 new releases for 2026 (Graz/BrainHero and Muse Sleep-Onset for training; Alljoined eval and emg2pose eval as hidden test cohorts that mirror their public parents) · the 4 NEW cohorts become downloadable via NeuralBench when the competition opens Sep 16, 2026 — the seed datasets are available now as starter-kit / analog data for pipeline development · all under their original providers' licenses · sleep annotations expert-scored, stimulus labels machine-derived, hand-pose labels motion-capture-derived · leakage held out by subject, session, stimulus, and movement stage · ground truth confidential, top-3 re-run by organisers · NeuralBench-EEG-Core v1.0 · 700+ additional EEG corpora ready via EEGDash Open the start-kit →

Backed by

Sponsors & organizing institutions

Compute, datasets, prizes, and engineering hours from 14 institutions across 5 countries. Yneuro hosts the platform; AWS provides the GPU cloud. Each track has its own sponsor: Alljoined for EEG-to-IMG, Meta FAIR Brain & AI for BCI decoding, InteraXon for sleep onset, and Meta Reality Labs for EMG-to-Pose.

Meet the team →

Compute partner

Track sponsors

Organizing institutions

Competition runs Sep 16 – Nov 16, 2026 · more after summer

Register your team for NeurIPS 2026.

Four tracks, sealed evaluation, a $30.000 prize pool ($2.500 per top-3 team per track), and a workshop slot in Sydney. Sign up to the mailing list for the start-kit and dataset links, submission access when the window opens Sep 16, and the post-summer announcement of audit, prizes, and workshop dates.