Challenges

• GC-1: The First Lunar Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge
• GC-2: CONVERGE Challenge 2027: Multimodal Learning for 6G Wireless Communications
• GC-3: ADD 2026: The Third Audio Deepfake Detection Challenge
• GC-4: ICASSP 2027 Audio Editing Challenge
• GC-5: FLAG 2027: Face-voice Association across Languages and Gender
• GC-6: RoboHEARD 2027: Robot-centric Embodied Hearing and Dialogue
• GC-7: EAR-1: Embodied Speech Perception under Oracle Navigation in Multi-Party Conversations
• GC-8: XACLE Challenge 2027: X-to-audio Alignment
• GC-9: Agent-Based Fetal Well-being Assessment through Cardiotocography Signals
• GC-10: Cadenza Challenge 2027: Predicting Lyric Intelligibility (CLIP2)
• GC-11: EEG-sAAD 2027: EEG Selective Auditory Attention Decoding
• GC-12: RTC-SDD 2027: Speech Deepfake Detection in Real-Time Communication
• GC-13: DOSE-I Challenge: Forecasting Response to Propofol
• GC-14: Identity-Preserving Video Generation Challenge 2027 (IPVG)
• GC-15: HEARTBEAT Challenge: Human-Centered Embodied Agents
• GC-16: LRAC 2.0: The Second Low-Resource Audio Codec Challenge
• GC-17: Face-voice Association across LAnguages and Gender (FLAG) 2027 Challenge
• GC-18: RMS-AQA: Real-world Multi-hop Spatial Audio Question Answering

GC-1: The First Lunar Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge

Submission Link:

Challenge website: lunarradiomapchallenge.github.io/

Challenge Schedule:

December 16, 2026 – Evaluation test data released
December 20, 2026 – Trained models, test code, and radio-map estimates due

Short description: Accurate radio-propagation modelling is fundamental to reliable wireless-network design, including emerging extraterrestrial missions. The First Lunar Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge invites participants to develop fast, data-driven alternatives to computationally expensive ray tracing. Using a novel dataset of pathloss radio maps generated through high-fidelity simulations over cratered lunar landscapes, participants will model signal attenuation across complex terrain and multiple frequency bands. The challenge focuses on generalization across reflection, shadowing, and refraction conditions created by continuous elevation changes, supporting future lunar communication and navigation networks as well as rugged terrestrial deployments.

GC-2: CONVERGE Challenge 2027: Multimodal Learning for 6G Wireless Communications

Submission Link:

Challenge website: Pending

Challenge Schedule:

September 15, 2026 – Website launch
October 15, 2026 – Competition launch and data release
November 30, 2026 – Registration deadline
December 15, 2026 – Submission deadline
January 3, 2027 – Results and rankings notification
January 14, 2027 – Invited 2-page papers due
January 21, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 28, 2027 – Camera-ready submission
May 16-21, 2027 – ICASSP SPGC session and winners announcement, Toronto

Short description: Millimeter-wave communication enables high data rates and low latency but is vulnerable to path loss, blockage, and beam misalignment. CONVERGE 2027 invites participants to develop machine-learning solutions that jointly exploit synchronized visual and radio measurements collected in real-world environments. Building on the ICASSP 2026 challenge, the 2027 edition adds a dataset collected at EURECOM in France to the existing INESC TEC/FEUP testbed in Portugal and introduces beam prediction as a new task. Four independent tracks address blockage prediction, user-equipment localization, channel prediction, and beam prediction, promoting collaboration across wireless communications, signal processing, computer vision, and AI.

GC-3: ADD 2026: The Third Audio Deepfake Detection Challenge

Submission Link:

Challenge website: addchallenge.cn/add2026

Challenge Schedule:

September 28, 2026 – Registration, training data, and baselines released
October 15, 2026 – Evaluation datasets released
November 23, 2026 – Registration deadline
December 7, 2026 – Submission deadline
December 21, 2026 – Results and rankings released
January 7, 2027 – Invited 2-page papers due
January 21, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 28, 2027 – Camera-ready papers due

Short description: The Third Audio Deepfake Detection Challenge addresses two emerging needs in speech security: detecting live human impersonation and producing transparent explanations for deepfake decisions. Track 1, Audio Impersonation Detection, asks participants to distinguish bona fide speech from recordings produced by professional human imitators. Track 2, Explainable Audio Deepfake Detection, uses genuine and synthetic speech generated by modern text-to-speech and voice-conversion systems and requires both a real/fake prediction and an explicit textual rationale. Researchers in audio forensics, speech processing, machine learning, deepfake detection, and speech-information security are invited to participate in either or both tracks.

GC-4: ICASSP 2027 Audio Editing Challenge

Submission Link:

Challenge website: audio-editing-challenge.github.io/

Challenge Schedule:

September 1, 2026 – Registration opens and guidelines released
October 1, 2026 – Challenge begins
November 10, 2026 – Data released and leaderboard opens
November 25, 2026 – Final submission deadline and leaderboard freeze
December 7, 2026 – Evaluation and reproducibility checks completed
December 8, 2026 – Final rankings and invited teams announced
January 7, 2027 – Invited 2-page papers due
All deadlines: 11:59 PM U.S. Pacific Time

Short description: Recent generative-audio models can follow natural-language instructions to modify speech, music, and environmental sounds, but reliable general-purpose editing remains an open challenge. Participants may enter a Single Model Track, developing a unified end-to-end editor, or an Agent Track, developing an autonomous system that plans, uses open-source models and signal-processing tools, inspects intermediate results, and refines its output. A human-annotated and verified dataset spans speech, music, environmental sound, and mixtures. Rubric-based evaluation measures instruction following, preservation of unrelated content, and exact completion of editing requirements on an unreleased test set.

GC-5: FLAG 2027: Face-voice Association across Languages and Gender

Submission Link:

Challenge website: mavceleb.github.io/dataset/competition.html

Challenge Schedule:

August 24-September 7, 2026 – Registration
September 1-October 15, 2026 – Progress phase
October 15-21, 2026 – Evaluation phase
October 27, 2026 – Results
October 30, 2026 – System descriptions due
December 7, 2026 – Challenge paper submission

Short description: FLAG 2027 evaluates whether face-voice association systems remain reliable across languages and avoid relying on gender as a shortcut for identity. The challenge includes a language-impact evaluation for matching the same speaker across English and Bengali and a gender-controlled evaluation in which negative pairs are selected from speakers in the same annotated gender group. Participants will use the expanded MAV-Celeb benchmark, a pretrained baseline, pre-extracted features, and a CodaBench leaderboard. The challenge aims to advance multilingual, identity-specific cross-modal modelling while encouraging transparent subgroup and uncertainty reporting.

GC-6: RoboHEARD 2027: Robot-centric Embodied Hearing and Dialogue

Submission Link:

Challenge website: https://roboheard.github.io/

Challenge Schedule:

September 15, 2026 – Challenge launch
October 15, 2026 – Development data and baselines released
November 15, 2026 – Registration and external-resource declaration deadline
December 1, 2026 – Test sets and leaderboard released
December 7, 2026 – Leaderboard freeze
December 15, 2026 – Technical reports due
December 22, 2026 – Online-track latency submissions due
December 30, 2026 – Official rankings released
January 7, 2027 – Invited 2-page papers due
January 21, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 28, 2027 – Camera-ready papers due

Short description: RoboHEARD 2027 invites participants to develop multi-speaker, time-stamped audio-visual speech-recognition systems for real mobile robots operating in home-companionship and navigation or shopping-assistance scenarios. Systems must determine who spoke, when they spoke, and what they said using robot-mounted microphone arrays, multi-view cameras, RGB-D cameras, and LiDAR. The challenge offers offline and low-latency online tracks evaluated with time-constrained minimum-permutation character error rate. The completed 80-hour corpus contains separate training, development, and test sets collected with the QUANTA robot, and reproducible baselines and a CodaBench leaderboard will be provided.

GC-7: EAR-1: Embodied Speech Perception under Oracle Navigation in Multi-Party Conversations

Submission Link:

Challenge website: earchallenge.github.io/ear1/

Challenge Schedule:

September 15, 2026 – Challenge launch
October 15, 2026 – Development data and baselines released
November 15, 2026 – Registration and external-resource declaration deadline
December 1, 2026 – Test sets and leaderboard released
December 7, 2026 – Leaderboard freeze
December 15, 2026 – Technical reports due
December 22, 2026 – Online-track latency submissions due
December 30, 2026 – Official rankings released
January 7, 2027 – Invited 2-page papers due
January 21, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 28, 2027 – Camera-ready papers due

Short description: RoboHEARD 2027 invites participants to develop multi-speaker, time-stamped audio-visual speech-recognition systems for real mobile robots operating in home-companionship and navigation or shopping-assistance scenarios. Systems must determine who spoke, when they spoke, and what they said using robot-mounted microphone arrays, multi-view cameras, RGB-D cameras, and LiDAR. The challenge offers offline and low-latency online tracks evaluated with time-constrained minimum-permutation character error rate. The completed 80-hour corpus contains separate training, development, and test sets collected with the QUANTA robot, and reproducible baselines and a CodaBench leaderboard will be provided.

GC-8: XACLE Challenge 2027: X-to-audio Alignment

Submission Link:

Challenge website: xacle.org/2027/

Challenge Schedule:

September 24, 2026 – Dataset and baseline model released
November 19, 2026 – Evaluation dataset released
December 3, 2026 – Results and system submission deadline
December 17, 2026 – Invitations for 2-page papers
January 7, 2027 – Invited 2-page papers due
January 21, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 28, 2027 – Camera-ready papers due

Short description: XACLE 2027 focuses on predicting semantic alignment between audio and text for reliable evaluation of x-to-audio generation. Building on XACLE 2026, the new edition shifts from accuracy on seen generation systems to generalization across unseen audio-generation models. Participants will train alignment predictors using audio produced by known models and evaluate them on audio produced by unseen models. The goal is to develop automatic metrics that remain highly correlated with human subjective judgments and continue to work as new text-to-audio and other x-to-audio systems emerge.

GC-9: Agent-Based Fetal Well-being Assessment through Cardiotocography Signals

Submission Link:

Challenge website: Pending

Challenge Schedule:

September 30, 2026 – Competition launch and data release
October 31, 2026 – Registration deadline
November 15, 2026 – Submission deadline
December 1, 2026 – Results and rankings notification
December 7, 2026 – Invited 2-page papers due
January 11, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 18, 2027 – Camera-ready submission

Short description: Response and revised proposal confirm ethics and release authorization, dataset readiness, label adjudication, missing-data rules, baselines, reproducibility, and secured prize funding. The proposal specifies ten US$1,000 awards (US$10,000 total). Website URL and primary contact email are still needed.

GC-10: Cadenza Challenge 2027: Predicting Lyric Intelligibility (CLIP2)

Submission Link:

Challenge website: cadenzachallenge.org

Challenge Schedule:  https://cadenzachallenge.org/docs/clip2/key_dates

Short description: The Cadenza Challenge invites participants to predict lyric intelligibility from stereo song excerpts played over loudspeakers by estimating the word-correct rate achieved by human listeners. Standard speech-intelligibility metrics remain unreliable for sung language because singing differs in rhythm and intonation and is embedded in complex musical accompaniment. Building on the ICASSP 2026 CLIP1 challenge, CLIP2 introduces a larger AI-generated music dataset spanning more genres, together with more demanding room acoustics, reverberation, and competing babble noise. The challenge supports improved music accessibility for people with hearing loss, although no prior hearing-loss expertise is required.

GC-11: EEG-sAAD 2027: EEG Selective Auditory Attention Decoding

Submission Link: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/17856/

Challenge website: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/17856/ 

Challenge Schedule:

September 1, 2026 (23:55 UTC) – Registration, training data, baselines, and development phase open
November 1, 2026 (23:55 UTC) – Testing phase and blind test data released
December 1, 2026 (23:55 UTC) – Submission deadline
December 14, 2026 (23:55 UTC) – Results announced

Short description: EEG selective auditory attention decoding aims to identify which speaker a listener attends to in a multi-talker environment, supporting next-generation neuro-steered hearing aids. EEG-sAAD 2027 focuses on cross-dataset generalization: participants train on multiple public datasets from different laboratories and languages, then evaluate on blind test sets with unseen subjects, stimuli, attention switches, and explicit eye-gaze control. Organizers will provide unified-format training data and linear and deep-learning baselines. Rankings combine per-sample decoding accuracy and switch-detection latency through their harmonic mean, and the five highest-ranked teams will be invited to submit two-page ICASSP papers.

GC-12: RTC-SDD 2027: Speech Deepfake Detection in Real-Time Communication

Submission Link:

Challenge website: https://www.junxue.tech/rtc-sdd-challenge/

Challenge Schedule:

September 1, 2026 – Baseline code and progress-stage dataset released
November 9, 2026 – Final evaluation data released
November 16, 2026 – Final result submission deadline
November 23, 2026 – Results and final ranking released
December 7, 2026 – Invited two-page papers due
January 11, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 18, 2027 – Camera-ready papers due
All deadlines: 11:59 PM U.S. Pacific Time

Short description: RTC-SDD 2027 advances robust speech-deepfake detection under realistic real-time communication conditions. Participants determine whether speech received after actual RTC transmission is bona fide or spoofed, despite platform-specific enhancement, codec compression, network transmission, environmental noise, and echo that may distort the artifacts used for detection. Evaluation covers a clean online subset representing standard RTC transmission and a noisy online subset with noise and echo introduced before transmission. The benchmark targets practical generalization across black-box RTC platforms and more reliable protection against impersonation, communication fraud, and misinformation.

GC-13: DOSE-I Challenge: Forecasting Response to Propofol

Submission Link:

Challenge website: https://safe-ai-research.github.io/DOSE-I-Challenge/

Challenge Schedule:

September 15, 2026 – Website online
October 1, 2026 – Challenge opens
December 1, 2026 – Final submission deadline
December 8, 2026 – Results and invitations
January 7, 2027 – Invited two-page papers due

Short description: DOSE-I asks participants to forecast a clinically observed response to propofol using information available at the time of administration. Teams will predict the future Modified Observer’s Assessment of Alertness/Sedation level approximately 60 seconds after each positive-dose or matched zero-dose episode and, as a secondary task, determine whether responsiveness increased, remained unchanged, or decreased. Public training data will include pre-index EEG, ECG, photoplethysmography, respiration, derived vital and EEG parameters, and propofol history. Final evaluation will use an independent, unreleased clinical cohort, inviting contributions from signal processing, machine learning, clinical monitoring, anesthesia, neuroscience, and consciousness research.

GC-14: Identity-Preserving Video Generation Challenge 2027 (IPVG)

Submission Link:

Challenge website: https://hidream-ai.github.io/ipvg-challenge-2027.github.io/

Challenge Schedule:

August 18, 2026 – Website and call for participation ready
September 1, 2026 – Training and validation datasets available
December 9, 2026 – Test sets available for both tracks
December 16, 2026 – Results submission deadline
December 17-21, 2026 – Objective evaluation
December 22, 2026 – Evaluation results announced
January 7, 2027 – Paper submission deadline
January 21, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 28, 2027 – Camera-ready papers due

Short description: The Identity-Preserving Video Generation Challenge includes two tracks: Facial Identity-Preserving Video Generation and Sequential Action Identity-Preserving Video Generation. The challenge aims to bring the community together around demanding identity-preserving video datasets and to encourage controllable generative models that bind identity accurately throughout generated video. By testing both facial identity and sequential-action consistency, IPVG seeks to advance more accountable and user-steerable video-synthesis systems.

GC-15: HEARTBEAT Challenge: Human-Centered Embodied Agents

Submission Link:

Challenge website: https://heartbeat-challenge.github.io/

Challenge Schedule:

October 7, 2026 – Registration opens and website goes live
October 14, 2026 – Data, rules, scoring tools, and baseline systems released
October 21, 2026 – Development leaderboard opens
November 20, 2026 – Team membership and resource declarations frozen
December 4, 2026 – Development leaderboard closes
December 11, 2026 – Final container submission deadline
December 18, 2026 – Final rankings and paper invitations announced
January 7, 2027 – Invited two-page papers due
January 28, 2027 – Camera-ready two-page papers due
All deadlines: 23:59 UTC unless otherwise stated

Short description: Recent real-time speech, audio-language, and multimodal models enable embodied agents to perceive ongoing interactions and respond with low latency, but existing benchmarks rarely test whether an agent should respond, when engagement is appropriate, or how it should act without unnecessary interruption. HEARTBEAT evaluates timely, context-aware, and human-centered behavior. Participants interpret evolving conversational, environmental, and user-context signals; decide whether to observe or engage; identify an appropriate response time; and select or generate a suitable action. The benchmark includes both response-worthy situations and ambiguous or premature cases where continued listening, monitoring, or abstention is preferable, supporting safer and more natural agents in real-world environments.

GC-16: LRAC 2.0: The Second Low-Resource Audio Codec Challenge

Submission Link:

Challenge website: https://lrac.short.gy

Challenge Schedule:

August 25, 2026 – Registration opens
September 1, 2026 – Challenge starts
November 17, 2026 – Registration closes
November 30, 2026 – Challenge ends
December 1, 2026 – Submission deadline
December 21, 2026 – Notification of results
January 7, 2027 – Invited two-page papers due
January 21, 2027 – Paper acceptance notification
January 28, 2027 – Camera-ready deadline

Short description: Traditional speech codecs are lightweight, low-latency, and ubiquitous, but they degrade at low and ultralow bitrates, or do not support them at all. Neural audio codecs (NACs) offer a promising alternative, providing high-quality speech at low and ultralow bitrates, robustness through redundancy coding, and useful representations for downstream tasks. However, deploying these benefits on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging because state-of-the-art NACs often require substantial computation, memory, and algorithmic latency.

Following the inaugural Low-Resource Audio Codec Challenge (LRAC 1.0, 2025), LRAC 2.0 evaluates neural speech codecs under joint constraints on compute, latency, bitrate, and memory efficiency. The challenge introduces five bitrate caps (1, 6, 12, 24, and 32 kbps) to investigate bitrate scaling toward transparent quality, as well as a dedicated memory-efficiency track with a hard parameter limit and a ranking penalty based on memory bandwidth. The challenge also takes an initial step toward multilingual evaluation: participants train on a fixed, public multilingual dataset, while systems are evaluated in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese using crowdsourced measures of subjective quality and intelligibility.

GC-17: Face-voice Association across LAnguages and Gender (FLAG) 2027 Challenge

Submission Link:

Challenge website: https://mavceleb.github.io/dataset/competition.html

Challenge Schedule:

Registration Period: 15 Sept. – 15 Oct. 2026

Progress Phase: 15 Sept. – 10 Nov. 2026

Evaluation Phase: 11 Nov. – 18 Nov. 2026

Challenge Results: 23 Nov. 2026

Submission of System Descriptions: 27 Nov. 2026

Challenge Paper Submission: 10 Dec. 2026

Short Description: Do face–voice association models learn who a person is, or do they just rely on the language spoken and the speaker’s gender? The FLAG 2027 Challenge asks participants to verify whether a face and a voice belong to the same person, using English–Bengali split of the MAV-Celeb dataset with 100 speakers. Systems are evaluated on a language heard during training and one that isn’t, both in a standard setting and in a harder same-gender setting, and ranked by average equal error rate. Training and development data, pre-extracted features and a pretrained baseline are available now, and submissions are scored on CodaBench. Registration is open until 15 October 2026, and prizes totalling $5,000 go to the top five teams.

GC-18: RMS-AQA: Real-world Multi-hop Spatial Audio Question Answering

Submission Link:

Challenge website: rmsaqachallenge.github.io

Challenge Schedule:

Short Description: The Real-world Multi-hop Spatial Audio Question Answering (RMS-AQA) Challenge invites participants to develop systems that answer natural-language questions about real-world multi-channel spatial audio recorded in smart-home environments. While recent large audio-language models have shown strong capabilities in recognizing acoustic events, most existing audio question answering benchmarks focus mainly on monaural “what happened” questions. RMS-AQA extends audio question answering toward embodied spatial reasoning, requiring models to infer not only what sounds occur, but also where they originate, when they occur, how multiple sources are spatially and temporally related, and what risk-aware actions may be appropriate.