Rules & FAQ.
Check the eight competition rules before submitting. For practical help, see the questions below or ask on Discord.
Eight binding rules.
Read these before submitting. They govern every track and take precedence over informal guidance elsewhere on the site.
Anyone can enter. Organisers cannot win prizes.
Industry, academia, students, and independents are all eligible, and cross-institution teams are encouraged. Organisers and their direct team members may submit, but their entries appear as Organizers on the leaderboard and are ineligible for cash prizes.
One team may enter all four tracks.
Each track accepts independent submissions per team and is scored on its own leaderboard, under the same harness and the same audit.
Five submissions a day in warm-up, one in the sealed final.
Warm-up (Sep 16 to Oct 15, 2026): 5 submissions per team per day. Sealed final (Oct 16 to Nov 16, 2026, AoE): 1 per team per day, so the prize roster reflects deliberate iteration rather than lottery search. The final NeurIPS ranking takes the sealed submissions.
Pre-train on any public dataset. Declare all of it.
Training data is suggested to stay within the track, but pre-training on any publicly available, redistributable dataset is allowed. The sealed test split is never allowed, and closed clinical datasets are not allowed. Declare every external corpus, and a compute estimate, in the method description that ships with your final submission. The audit cross-checks it against a re-run of neuralbench eeg from your committed config.
Training compute is uncapped. Inference is 60 minutes on one GPU.
Train on whatever you have. The single constraint is inference: the scoring container must complete a full test pass in under 60 minutes on one H100 or H200 instance, so that audit cost stays bounded and per-team runtime stays comparable. AWS, the compute partner, provides complimentary instance hours to finalists.
Any attempt to cheat means immediate disqualification.
Any attempt to cheat, including but not limited to using closed clinical data, accessing the sealed test split, or modifying the scoring harness, results in immediate disqualification from the competition. This decision is made by the organising committee and is final.
The top three per track must replay within ±2σ.
After the sealed final closes, the top-3 of every track go through a reproducibility audit: we re-run your training pipeline from the committed config and re-score the resulting weights 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 organising committee chairs the audit.
Reproducible top teams are announced during the NeurIPS workshop.
Top-ranked teams that pass the audit and submit a method description, training and inference code, and pre-training disclosures are announced during the NeurIPS workshop. This opportunity is offered to teams with complete, reproducible artifacts.
Questions people ask.
Answers, not rules: nothing here overrides the eight rules above.
RegistrationWhere do I register and submit?
Registration is open now. Use the track registration page to choose the Codabench competitions you want to enter. Submissions open September 21, 2026.
See the NeuralBench guides for preparation and Discord for help.
DatasetsWhen is the Track 3 Muse Sleep-Onset dataset available, and how do I access it?
The four NEW 2026 competition releases - Muse Sleep-Onset (Track 3), Graz/BrainHero (Track 2), and the Alljoined and EMG2Pose evaluation splits - become available when the competition opens on September 21, 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 21.
Before the Sep 21 release, neuralbench eeg sleep_onset --download returns the seed datasets (Sleep-EDF, PhysioNet Challenge 2018, HMC Sleep). These are starter-kit and analog data for building and validating your pipeline. They are 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.
Low participationWhat 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.
DelaysWhat 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.
Data releaseWill 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.
Reach the organising team.
Contact the organising team on Discord.