Competition Closed: Verification and Write-ups

Thank you to everyone who took part in the 2026 PNPL Competition! Submissions have now closed, and we are contacting top-performing teams to verify their results before confirming the final standings.

If you would like your team to be considered for prizes or have your score verified on the leaderboard and your certificate of participation, please email libribrain@robots.ox.ac.uk with your Kaggle team name, username(s) and track(s). Final evaluation uses a holdout set separate from the public leaderboard, so we especially encourage teams in the top 20 to get in touch.

Verification materials

• Deep Track: please provide the trained model checkpoint corresponding to your submission. We highly encourage you to include your training code as well, and may follow up if we need it to complete verification.
• Broad Track: please provide the trained model checkpoint corresponding to your submission and the training code used to produce it. Code submission is required.

We will use these materials to verify results and check compliance with the rules, including the Broad Track restrictions concerning the timing information leak we previously announced.

You can send files directly to libribrain@robots.ox.ac.uk, share a download link, or invite the GitHub user gereonelvers to your repository. Include checkpoint files or links, configuration, dependencies and instructions needed to run your model. If submitting for both tracks, please identify which files correspond to each.

Kaggle will display the private leaderboard within the next week. It will give a useful indication of performance, but all rankings remain subject to verification and there are additional prizes beyond leaderboard placement. We will announce the final winners separately. Unfortunately, Kaggle's leaderboard release is separate from our verification and prize process, so its displayed standings should not be treated as the final competition outcome.

Timelines

• By 23 October 2026: please let us know whether you plan to submit for verification. If we have not heard from you by then, we will start proactively contacting teams further down the leaderboard.
• By 30 October 2026: please send your checkpoints and code as outlined above. Let us know if you need more time.
• By 1 December 2026: we aim to announce the final standings, winners and prizes.
• By 1 December 2026: please submit your write-up if you would like to contribute one. Let us know if you need more time.

Showcase your work

Invited teams and any team in the public leaderboard's top 20 are welcome to submit a write-up to showcase their work. Write-ups can be up to six pages, excluding references and appendices, and must use the 2026 PNPL Competition LaTeX template. The papers page has the template and links to last year's examples.

We plan to host submitted write-ups on the competition website, as a way for teams to receive credit for their work and as a useful resource for the community going forward. We will read every submission and apply light quality control: if we spot any issues, we will get back to the authors and give them the chance to address them. There is no formal peer review, and these are not formal publications, so you are free to submit the same work to arXiv, workshops, conferences or other competitions without restriction.