Call for tasks
Contribute to IOAI 2025!
The IOAI International Scientific Committee (ISC) invites AI researchers worldwide to contribute to the design of competition tasks for IOAI 2025.
The competition consists of three stages:
At-Home Round: Students work on three tasks over one month at home. This round is educational and does not affect the final results.
Contest 1: Continuation of the at-home tasks.
Contest 2: Features novel tasks, unrelated to the at-home stage.
Contest 1 and Contest 2 are individual contests, which will take place during IOAI 2025 in China (August 2–9, 2025).
Task Requirements
Tasks must:
Be original, unseen by IOAI 2025 contestants, and not reused from other competitions.
Be clearly described, with unambiguous instructions and defined evaluation criteria.
Be tailored to the capabilities of top high school students representing national teams, striking a balance between theoretical understanding and practical application.
Materials Needed
Task Description: In English (Jupyter Notebook or PDF preferred), including input/output format and scoring method.
Datasets:
Training Set: For model generation.
Testing Set: For public scores.
Providing a suitable public or private dataset is optional but highly recommended.
Baseline Solution: A Python script (baseline.py) that generates outputs to be evaluated using the scoring method. Providing a baseline solution is optional but highly recommended.
Note Document:
Author details (name, affiliation, country, and contact email).
Computing resource limits (e.g., T4 GPU for 1 hour; optional).
Motivation behind the task (optional).
Submission Process
Compress all materials of one task into a single file (e.g., .zip or .tgz).
If you want to submit multiple tasks, create one compressed file per task.
Email the compressed file(s) to task@ioai-official.org.
Submission Deadline: January 31, 2025
Task Selection Criteria
We hope excellent task submissions will have the following qualities:
Hammer resistance: Good tasks are not easily solved with off-the-shelf, general-purpose methods (hammers) but instead require problem-specific adaptations.
Multiple insights and partial solutions: Good tasks require multiple insights for a complete solution, and have scope for progressively rewarding partial solutions.
Educational Value: Good tasks reward rigorous understanding, teach useful skills, and inspire students to learn more.
Fast Iteration Cycles: Good tasks do not require lengthy training or processing steps, so more time can be spent on problem-solving instead.
Originality: Good tasks are inventive, focus on atypical applications, go beyond standard problem settings.
As we intend to evaluate submissions along these criteria, we encourage you think through how your proposed task can be improved to better meet these goals.
What Happens Next
1. The Host Scientific Committee (HSC) and ISC will carefully review all submitted tasks and select six main tasks (three for Contest 1 and three for Contest 2), along with three backup tasks. At-home tasks will be derived as simplified versions of Contest 1 tasks.
2. Once the selection process is complete, all authors will be promptly notified (no later than March 15, 2025) whether their task is among the nine chosen or not. Unselected tasks may be immediately used or submitted to other competitions.
3. All nine selected tasks must remain confidential until the conclusion of IOAI 2025.
4. The ISC further refines and develops selected tasks to ensure the quality of test data, solutions (both optimal and sub-optimal), and all grading materials. To support this process, the ISC may invite the task author to collaborate. Please note that while submitted tasks may inspire or inform ISC-led developments, not all proposals will be adopted in their original form.
5. Authors of selected tasks will also receive an invitation to attend IOAI 2025 in Beijing, China, as guests (travel expenses to be covered by the authors; accommodation provided by IOAI).
6. The names and affiliations of the authors of the final set of six tasks that are used for contest 1 and 2 will be formally recognized during the General Assembly meeting of IOAI and showcased on the official website.
7. All at-home tasks, Contest 1 and Contest 2 tasks, along with training and test data, official solutions, and other grading materials, will be published on the IOAI platform under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.
8. Three unused tasks from the nine selected will be returned to their authors immediately after IOAI 2025, allowing authors to resubmit them for the next IOAI (provided confidentiality is maintained) or use them in other competitions.