Rules

1. Terms and conditions

Foreign citizens who have reached the age of 18 and citizens of Russia who are at least 14 are eligible to participate in the competition.

Category problems are available in two languages: Russian and English. Competition participants are divided into three streams (Main, Juniors, and Employees).

A Main Stream Participant is a legally capable individual who has reached the age of eighteen, acts on their own behalf, holds citizenship of any country, and is not an employee of the Organizer and/or its affiliated persons during the period from September 16, 2025, to December 7, 2025. Individuals who are family members (spouses, children, etc.) of an employee of the Organizer and/or its affiliated persons involved in the organization of the Competition cannot be Main Stream Participants.

Juniors stream: minors who have reached the age of 14 and are citizens of Russia.

A Stream Participant in the "Employees" category is an individual who is employed by the Organizer and/or its affiliated persons during the period from September 17, 2025, to December 7, 2025, and is not involved in the organization of a specific Competition Track. Family members and relatives of these employees are not allowed to participate in the Competition.

All terms not defined in these rules are interpreted as in the Competition Regulations available at: https://yandex.com/cup/regulations.

2. Registration

To participate in the Competition, it is necessary to register. The Organizer reserves the right to disqualify a participant who provides knowingly false information about themselves during registration. Registration will be open until October 29, 2025, at 23:59 Moscow time (UTC+3).

After registering, the participant confirms they have read and accept the Competition Regulations available at https://yandex.com/cup/regulations and Competition Rules available at https://yandex.com/cup/rules#algorithm.

3. Round scoring system

During the tournament

The Trial and Qualification Rounds last 240 minutes each. Each problem has a limited number of attempts to solve: 100. All submitted solutions are checked during the competition. Participants submit their solutions as soon as they are ready directly in the testing system using the provided software. When submitting solutions, participants choose which compiler will be used by the testing system running Linux.

Solutions are checked by system tests that are identical for all participants and hidden from them. Checking is carried out automatically, so participant solutions must strictly adhere to the input and output file formats specified in the problem instructions. Unless otherwise specified, all input data is assumed to be correct and satisfy all constraints specified in the problem when checking solutions.

The time limit for each test and maximum permitted memory are specified in the problem instructions. If either of these limits is exceeded, the test is failed.

List of testing system verdicts

In the event of a Compilation error, the solution will not be checked on any of the tests and the participant will be informed about the error immediately. This attempt will not be taken into account when calculating penalties. In the event of Run-time error, Memory limit exceeded, and Time-limit exceeded errors, program output is not checked.

Repeated submission of identical solutions is not permitted.

Calculation of interim and final results

Participants are ranked based on the number of points scored. Participants who have scored the same number of points are ranked by the time of the last submission that strictly increased their score.

Problem solution time is counted in seconds from the start of the competition until the moment the first problem solution is submitted that earns the most points.

Solutions that earned no points by the end of the competition are not taken into account when calculating the time.

The table with current results displays the number of points scored by the participant for the problem. Problems may contain several groups of tests. A participant's solution earns points for a group of tests if it successfully passes all tests in the group. The number of test groups and potential points for each group are specified in the problem instructions. Points earned for different test groups are totaled together.

The table with final round results will be frozen one hour before the competition ends. The decision on winners will be made after additional verification based on final results.

4. The Competition Structure

The competition is held in three rounds:

• The Trial Round will start on October 20, 2025, at 12:00 and end on October 29, 2025, at 23:59. During this period, each registered participant can start at a time that is convenient for them. The duration of the round is 240 minutes. The start time is indicated in Moscow time (UTC+3). Participation in the Trial Round is optional and does not affect the tournament table.

• The Qualification Round of the Competition will be held on November 2, 2025, starting at 5:00 p.m. Moscow time. The round will last 240 minutes. The result of the Qualification Round will be determined by two values: points for solved problems and penalty time. A participant will rank higher in the final table if they have more points, taking penalty time into account. If participants have the same number of points, the participant with less problem-solving time will rank higher.

  Rule on proctoring of the qualification stage and submission of recordings to the organizers

  General provisions:

  • This rule establishes the requirements for participants who are applying to advance to the final stage of the Competition.
  • The rule is mandatory for all Competition participants who wish to advance to the final.

  Proctoring requirements:

  • Participants applying to advance to the final must use a proctoring system during the qualification stage.
  • The proctoring system must ensure the integrity and transparency of the qualification stage by monitoring the participant and their surroundings while completing the problems.

  Recording and submission of materials:

  • During the qualification stage, the proctoring system must record the entire process of completing the problems. The recording must include video materials showing the participant, their computer screen, and the surrounding area.
  • After completing the qualification stage, the participant must upload the recording to a convenient platform (for example, cloud storage or YouTube).
  • The participant must ensure that the recording quality allows the organizers to view it without difficulty and verify compliance with the Competition rules.

  Participant responsibility:

  • Participants are responsible for ensuring the proper functioning of the proctoring system and the quality of the submitted recording.
  • Failure to comply with the requirements of this rule may result in disqualification from the Competition.

  Organizers’ rights:

  • The organizers have the right to verify the integrity of the recording and the compliance of the qualification stage conditions with the Competition rules.
  • If violations or discrepancies are detected, the organizers have the right to request additional information from the participant or disqualify them from the Competition.

  The announcement of the participants advancing to the final will be made by November 10, 2025.

• The Final Round will be held from December 5 to December 7 in Istanbul, Turkey. During the finals, all participants start at the same time and have a total of 300 minutes to solve problems. The prize pool will be distributed among participants of the final round. The five participants from the Main Stream and three participants from the Junior Stream with the best results will receive monetary prizes.

  The Organizer reserves the right to invite additional participants to the final round if any of the selected participants opt out. Additional participants are selected based on the results of the semi-finals.

5. Prizes

More information about prizes is available in the Competition Regulations https://yandex.com/cup/regulations.

1. Terms and conditions

Foreign citizens who have reached the age of 18 and citizens of Russia who are at least 14 are eligible to participate in the competition.

Category problems are available in two languages: Russian and English. Competition participants are divided into three streams (Main, Juniors, and Employees).

A Main Stream Participant is a legally capable individual who has reached the age of eighteen, acts on their own behalf, holds citizenship of any country, and is not an employee of the Organizer and/or its affiliated persons during the period from September 17, 2025, to December 7, 2025. Individuals who are family members (spouses, children, etc.) of an employee of the Organizer and/or its affiliated persons involved in the organization of the Competition cannot be Main Stream Participants.

Juniors stream: minors who have reached the age of 14 and are citizens of Russia.

A Stream Participant in the "Employees" category is an individual who is employed by the Organizer and/or its affiliated persons during the period from September 17, 2025, to December 7, 2025, and is not involved in the organization of a specific Competition Track. Family members and relatives of these employees are not allowed to participate in the Competition.

All terms not defined in these rules are interpreted as in the Competition Regulations available at: https://yandex.com/cup/regulations.

2. Registration

To participate in the Competition, it is necessary to register. The Organizer reserves the right to disqualify a participant who provides knowingly false information about themselves during registration. Registration will be open until October 29, 2025, at 23:59 Moscow time (UTC+3).

After registering, the participant confirms they have read and accept the Competition Regulations available at https://yandex.com/cup/regulations and Competition Rules available at https://yandex.com/cup/rules#ml.

Participation and Account

2.1. To participate in the Competition, you must have a valid Yandex ID account. You guarantee that you provide accurate, complete, and up-to-date registration information about yourself.

2.2. Creating and using more than one active Yandex ID account for participation in the Competition is prohibited. Each individual is permitted to participate under only one account.

2.3. Any transfer of your account to other persons, as well as participation under another person's name with the intent to mislead others about your identity (impersonation), is prohibited.

2.4. If suspicions of a violation of clauses 2.2 or 2.3 arise, the Organizer reserves the right, without prior notice, to apply the following measures:

• Annulment of Competition results obtained using the related accounts;
• Disqualification of the participant from all current and future competitions held by the Organizer;
• Revocation of the right to receive any Competition prizes.

3. Round scoring system

During the tournament

The "Machine Learning" track includes three sub-tracks (hereinafter referred to as the "Sub-track"):

1. Autonomous Driving camera sensor image generation
2. STEM problem illustrations Q&A with VLMs
3. Large Language Models hallucinations robustness

The competition within each Sub-track runs from 15 October 2025, 16:00 to 5 November 2025, 23:59. Each Sub-track features a single task.

Participants must submit their solutions to the testing system using the provided software as they are ready.

Technical Constraints

Participant solutions are executed on a virtual machine with the following configuration:

• Platform: Intel Ice Lake
• Accelerator: NVIDIA T4 GPU
• Number of GPUs: 1
• vCPU: 4
• RAM: 15 GB
• Disk Space: 20 GB
• Time Limit: 1 (one) hour.

A rolling 24-hour submission limit is applied to each task. By default, a participant is allowed no more than 2 (two) solution submissions in any consecutive 24-hour period for a single task.

Any submission that exceeds the established limits will not be accepted or processed by the testing system. Furthermore, such a submission will be counted as used and will deplete the daily submission quota.

The specific limitations for each task are defined in its problem statement.

Description of the solution format

For the development of the solution, you will be provided with a separate GitLab repository.

You will have the opportunity to:

• set up the required environment using a Dockerfile;
• upload the model inference code;
• upload model weights using DVC technology.

The repository will contain sample code for working with data. You can find more detailed instructions in the repository.

The verification system will build a Docker image with the required environment, model parameters, and inference code, and run it for verification.

There will be no internet access at the model inference stage.

List of testing system verdicts

If a Crash error occurs, the submitted solution does not consume the daily quota of attempts.

If any of the other errors listed above occur, the participant's attempt is counted as used.

If your solution runs for more than one hour, the system will stop it, the solution will receive a Time-limit exceeded verdict, and this attempt will be counted towards the daily quota of attempts.

Calculation of interim and final results

A participant's solution that satisfies all task constraints is considered Accepted, and points are awarded for it. The scoring system for each task is described in the respective problem statement.

Unless otherwise stated in the problem conditions, the final results are recalculated after the competition ends using a private test dataset. Details regarding this process and the specific scoring system will be provided in each problem statement.

Points for an accepted problem are awarded based on the last successful submission.

Participant solutions within each sub-track are ranked according to the total score received for solved tasks. Participants with an equal total score are ranked by the timestamp of their last successful submission.

The problem-solving time is measured in seconds from the start of the competition until the submission time of the first solution for that problem which achieved the maximum score.

4. The Competition Structure

The competition is held in two rounds:

• The Qualification Round will start on 15 October 2025 at 16:00 and conclude on 5 November 2025 at 23:59. During this period, each registered participant may start the round at their convenience.

  The results of the Qualification Round are determined by the total score for solved tasks within each respective Sub-track. A participant is ranked higher in the final standings if they have a higher total score. In the case of a tied score, the participant with the lower total problem-solving time is ranked higher.

  The list of finalists who qualify for the Final Round will be announced by 10 November 2025.

• The Final Round will be held from 5 to 7 December in Istanbul, Turkey. All participants must start simultaneously, and the round will last for 300 minutes.

  The prize fund will be awarded among participants of the two Final tracks: the Main Stream and the Juniors Stream. The top five participants from the Main Stream and the top four participants from the Juniors Stream in each direction with the best results will receive monetary prizes.

  The Organizer reserves the right to invite additional participants to the Final Round if any of the initially selected qualifiers decline their participation. These additional participants will be selected based on their Qualification Round results.

5. Prizes

More information about prizes is available in the Competition Regulations https://yandex.com/cup/regulations.