The PokéAgent Challenge is a NeurIPS 2025 competition designed to establish Pokémon battling and gameplay as benchmarks for general decision-making in AI. It features two tracks: Competitive Battling and RPG Speedrunning, which together unify reinforcement learning and large language model research.
The competition is open to all individuals and teams, with no restrictions on team size or affiliation. Participants may enter either or both tracks (Battles, Speedrunning).
Participants will have access to:
Yes, Track 1 permits external LLM usage with full documentation and supports training on our 3.5M-battle dataset or self-play. Track 2 allows most methodological approaches which uses a neural network to produce the action. However, we do not allow the use of heavy heuristics as we want to encourage a generalizable solution. We reserve the right to disqualify submissions that we deem to be in violation of the rules.
For Track 1 (Pokémon Battles), we will use established player rating schemes, win rates against baselines, and metrics for efficiency and reliability.
For Track 2 (RPG Speedrunning), the primary metric is time and completion percentage, measuring progress through a standardized list of critical game milestones, with a secondary metric of Success Rate.
Yes, incentives include monetary prizes (subject to sponsorship), research collaboration opportunities, presentation slots at NeurIPS 2025, computational resources, and opportunity to co-author a subsequent NeurIPS 2026 submission for top solutions.
No, prior experience with Pokémon is not required. We provide comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and resources to help participants understand the game mechanics and develop effective agents regardless of their familiarity with Pokémon.