Dear Colleagues,

We announce the 2025 challenge sponsored by The Algonauts Project: How the Human Brain Makes Sense of Multimodal Movies. We invite you to join us in this competition to develop the best brain encoding models that are multimodal and that well generalize beyond their training distribution.

The challenge is based on data from CNeuroMod, the largest dataset of human brain fMRI responses to multimodal movies.

Participants whose models most closely match recorded brain data (top 3) will receive monetary prizes for a total of 17,000 € (1st 9,000 €; 2nd 5,000 €; 3rd 3,000 €), and will be invited to present their winning models at this year’s Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN) conference, in Amsterdam, in August 2025.

The challenge is open to all, and provides transparent, directly comparable results through a public leaderboard that is updated automatically after each submission to facilitate rapid model assessment and guide development.

Submission deadline: July 13, 2025

Website: https://algonautsproject.com/

Email: algonauts.mit@gmail.com

Bluesky: @algonautsproject.bsky.social

X: @AlgonautsProj

We look forward to your participation in the challenge!

The Algonauts Project Team

Algonauts Project 2025 Challenge Team:

Alessandro Gifford, Freie Universität Berlin

Domenic Bersch, Goethe University Frankfurt

Marie St-Laurent, CRIUGM

Basile Pinsard, CRIUGM

Julie Boyle, Université de Montréal

Lune Bellec, Université de Montréal

Aude Oliva, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Gemma Roig, Goethe University Frankfurt

Radoslaw Cichy, Freie Universität Berlin