Multi-track
RULES
Can I submit to more than one track?
Yes. All four tracks accept independent submissions per team, scored on their own leaderboards.
About · participant FAQ
FAQ.
Direct answers on eligibility, submission caps, audit, authorship, and contingency. Use this page before you submit.
At a glance · twelve answers
REFERENCE
Each answer is sourced from the competition proposal. If the FAQ contradicts something you read elsewhere on the site, treat this page as canonical and tell us. Email or Discord, same response time either way.
Rules basics
Submitting to one track, or all four.
Multi-track entries are encouraged. Each of the four tracks accepts independent submissions per team under the same harness and audit.
Phase caps
Warm-up is generous. The sealed final tightens the cap so the prize roster reflects the model, not the search.
Submission cap
RULES
What's the daily submission cap?
The warm-up phase (Sep 16 – Oct 15, 2026) is uncapped; iterate freely. The sealed final phase (Oct 16 – Nov 16, 2026 AoE) caps you at 5 submissions per team per day, so the prize roster reflects deliberate iteration rather than lottery search. The final NeurIPS ranking takes the best of your last five sealed submissions.
Datasets
DATA
When is the Track 3 Muse Sleep-Onset dataset available, and how do I access it?
The four NEW 2026 competition cohorts — Muse Sleep-Onset (Track 3), Graz/BrainHero (Track 2), and the Alljoined and emg2pose evaluation sets — are released when the competition opens on September 16, 2026. From that date, neuralbench eeg sleep_onset --download pulls the official Muse cohort directly. There is no separate platform, access link, or manual permission step beyond registering your team — just update your NeuralBench install after Sep 16.
Before September, neuralbench eeg sleep_onset --download returns the seed datasets (Sleep-EDF, PhysioNet Challenge 2018, HMC Sleep). These are starter-kit / analog data for building and validating your pipeline — development stand-ins, not the sealed evaluation set or the official Track 3 cohort. Release notices go to the website and Discord, so watch there for the exact drop.
Contingency
If a track underfills, or the timeline slips.
The competition has explicit fallbacks for low participation and delay. Neither outcome silently invalidates work already submitted; the rules below are how the organisers respond when reality disagrees with the plan.
No silent changes
Schedule shifts and analysis-group merges are announced on the website and Discord before they take effect.
Low participation
POLICY
What happens if a track has too few participants?
Low-participation tracks fold into the closest active analysis group for the post-competition report, but prizes are still awarded on that track's own leaderboard. Each track is scored independently, so low participation on one track never shrinks the field on another.
Delays
POLICY
What if there's a delay?
Technical, data, or infrastructure delays shift all downstream deadlines by the same amount on the website and Discord. The reproducibility audit gate is the only milestone that can extend independently if a top submission needs more re-run time.
Eligibility
Who can win.
Open by default. Organizer-affiliated entries appear on the leaderboard as reference but cannot take prize positions.
Open by default
Industry, academia, students, independents: all eligible. Cross-institution teams are encouraged.
Eligibility
OPEN
Who can win?
Anyone: industry, academia, students, independents. Cross-institution teams encouraged. Organizers and their direct lab members may submit, but their entries appear as Organizers · reference and are ineligible for cash prizes.
Publication & data
Authorship rights and pre-training data.
The PMLR competition report is the long-form artifact of the challenge. Reproducible top teams are co-authors. Pre-training data follows one rule: in-track training is preferred, but any publicly available dataset is allowed.
Disclose to be cited
Pre-training corpora and compute estimates go in the method description. The audit reads them; the report names you.
Authorship
PUBLICATION
What about authorship on the competition report?
Top-ranked teams that pass the reproducibility audit and submit a method description, training and inference code, and pre-training disclosures are invited as named authors on the PMLR competition report. Consortium authorship is offered to teams with complete, reproducible artifacts.
External data
POLICY
What pre-training datasets are allowed?
Training data is suggested to stay within the track, but pre-training on any publicly available dataset is allowed; reproducibility scripts from top submissions are checked at audit. The sealed test split is never allowed; closed clinical datasets are not allowed. Declare every external corpus in your method description.
Data & audit
What gets released, and what the audit decides.
New data is released where consent and licensing allow. Hidden evaluation labels stay confidential indefinitely. The audit re-runs the submitted training pipeline and compares scores against a tolerance band.
Audit lead
Arnaud Delorme (EEGLAB) chairs the reproducibility audit. Tolerance band is ±2σ around the submitted score.
Data release
DATA
Will the competition data be released?
After the challenge, new data is made publicly available in full or in part where consent, licensing, and provider policy allow. The hidden evaluation labels remain confidential indefinitely so the benchmark stays usable for future research.
Audit tolerance
AUDIT
What if the audit re-run produces a different score?
The audit re-runs your training pipeline from the committed config and re-scores against the sealed split. Scores within ±2σ of your submitted number stay on the prize roster; scores outside the tolerance drop off the prize roster but remain on the public board for context. The audit is led by Arnaud Delorme (EEGLAB).
Still stuck?
Reach the organising team.
Email or Discord. Same response time either way.