A NeurIPS 2025 competition advancing AI decision-making through Pokémon. Featuring competitive battling and RPG speedrunning tracks to unify research in reinforcement learning and large language models.
A NeurIPS 2025 competition advancing AI decision-making through Pokémon. Featuring competitive battling and RPG speedrunning tracks to unify research in reinforcement learning and large language models.
Click to explore detailed information, submission guidelines, starter code, and datasets for each track.
The PokéAgent Challenge positions Pokémon as an ideal testbed for artificial intelligence research, offering two complementary tracks that address fundamental challenges in decision-making.
This competition addresses critical frontiers in AI research at the intersection of reinforcement learning, game theory, planning, and language models. It creates a standardized benchmark for opponent modeling under partial observability and long-horizon reasoning—two capabilities essential for advancing AI beyond controlled environments.
Join the PokéAgent Challenge Discord server to register and connect with other participants!
Compute Credit Application (Recommended for Students): Apply to receive GCP credits for cloud compute and Gemini API access. Roughly $100+ per team (pending submissions). Applications will be reviewed and distributed on a rolling basis until funds are depleted.
Multiple prize categories ensure diverse contributions are recognized and rewarded
Performance-based prizes for teams placing high on the leaderboard in each track. Top performers in Track 1 tournament brackets and Track 2 speedrun rankings will receive prizes and recognition.
Method-specific prizes recognizing innovative approaches across all AI paradigms. Categories may include: Best LLM-based method, Best RL method, or other breakthrough techniques.
Workshop invitations for winning teams to present at NeurIPS 2025. Selected teams will also be invited as co-authors on the official competition report publication.
Distributed across multiple categories to reward both excellence and innovation
We're actively seeking additional sponsors to support this groundbreaking AI competition. Sponsorship opportunities include prize pool contributions, infrastructure support, and more.
Princeton University
UT Austin
Carnegie Mellon University
Google DeepMind
UT Austin
Carnegie Mellon University
UT Austin
Princeton University
If you use this competition in your research, please cite our paper:
@inproceedings{karten2025pokeagent,
title = {The PokeAgent Challenge: Competitive and Long-Context Learning at Scale},
author = {Karten, Seth and Grigsby, Jake and Milani, Stephanie and Vodrahalli, Kiran
and Zhang, Amy and Fang, Fei and Zhu, Yuke and Jin, Chi},
booktitle = {NeurIPS Competition Track},
year = {2025},
month = apr,
}