Prizes

$112K in prizes and awards. Winners are determined by the headline score described on the evaluation page, computed on the hidden test set after final submissions close.

The Challenge is organised by the Qiu Lab at Stanford University and its collaborators, who set the criteria and decide the awards. It is supported financially by the Laude Institute Moonshots Seed Grant.

Prizes are awarded separately in each track, so a human-designed method never competes with an agent-designed one for the same prize. Across both tracks the prize pool splits as follows.

The one exception is the Generality Award: a single $8K award, the same as a first prize, for the best entry that answers more than one task with one shared architecture. It is awarded once rather than once per track, so it is the only prize the two tracks compete for together, and it is held in addition to any placed prize.

1^st

$16K

2 winners · $8K each

2^nd

$20K

4 winners · $5K each

3^rd

$18K

6 winners · $3K each

Where the $112K goes

$54K Winner prizes: Per track ($27K × 2): one $8K first prize, two $5K second prizes, three $3K third prizes. Tracks are scored on the same hidden tests but awarded separately.
$8K Generality Award: One award, not one per track: the single best entry answering more than one task with one shared architecture, whether it came from a Human Team or an Agent Team. Held in addition to any placed prize.
$30K Travel awards: 15-20 grants for early-career researchers to attend the NeurIPS workshop.
$20K Community Contribution Award: Up to 100 contributors at up to $200 each, for tutorials, notebooks, tools, documentation and fixes that help other people compete. Not decided on leaderboard ranking, and open to people who are not competing at all. How to apply →

Winner prizes in full

Six prizes in each track, twelve winners in total. The totals do not descend across the three places. There are more winners at second and third than at first.

Place	Per prize	Per track	Both tracks	Winners
1st	$8K × 1	$8K	$16K	2
2nd	$5K × 2	$10K	$20K	4
3rd	$3K × 3	$9K	$18K	6
Total		$27K	$54K	12

The two tracks

Track 1 Human Team: Conventional ML-competition workflow.
Methods designed and supervised by human participants. Algorithm/model design → submission → evaluation. Standard NeurIPS competition track.
Track 2 Agent Team: Coding agents / LLM-driven recursive systems.
Methods produced by coding agents or LLM-based evolutionary systems. A human may write the initial prompt; from there the run must be the agent’s own, no human inspecting intermediate results and feeding judgement back in. What counts is either carrying a published method through optimisation end to end, or inventing and implementing a new algorithm from scratch. Prizes require evidence: the trajectory, the prompts, and the harness code. What cannot be verified cannot win.

Eligibility · Agent Team

Agent Team prizes require evidence, filed against each submission: the agent's trajectory, every prompt it was given including the first, and the harness that ran it. A human may write the starting prompt; nobody may read intermediate results and steer on them. What counts is carrying a published method through optimisation end to end, or inventing and implementing a new algorithm from scratch.

An Agent Team entry is held at submission until at least two distinct kinds of these are attached, and only then enters the scoring queue. What we cannot verify is not eligible for a prize, and what has nothing attached does not score at all. Human Team entries are not asked for any of this.

Funding

The Challenge is supported financially by the Laude Institute Moonshots Seed Grant. The Organisers set the criteria and decide the awards. Prize amounts are those in the accepted competition proposal; what is finally awarded is governed by the Challenge Rules.