-
Languages and tools: You may only use open-source languages and tools in building models for this challenge.
-
Who can compete: The Gen AI for Good Challenge: Cities Edition is open to legal residents of the United States and international jurisdictions where permitted by local law.
-
Submission Limits: 1 submission per day, 20 submissions overall.
-
Team size: Max team size of 4
-
Datasets, compute and model constraints: One generative model with no more than 3 billion parameters, with a maximum of 15 model calls and 12,000 generated tokens per question.
-
Final ranking: The public leaderboard scores a subset of Test questions. Final ranking uses the better full-Test score from each team's two selected submissions, subject to eligibility and reproducibility checks.
-
Data Sharing: Each source retains its own licence and attribution requirements.
-
Code Review: The provisional top 100 after final evaluation will receive an email requesting their code. You will have 48 hours to submit your code.
-
Code sharing: Multiple accounts, or sharing of code and information across accounts not in teams, is not allowed and will lead to disqualification.
ENTRY INTO THIS CHALLENGE CONSTITUTES YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THESE OFFICIAL CHALLENGE RULES.
Full Challenge Rules
The rules on this page represent rules for Step 1 of Phase 1 of the Gen AI for Good Challenge: Cities Edition i.e. the technical assessment task hosted on Zindi. View the full rules of the Gen AI for Good Challenge: Cities Edition here.
Prizes and Eligibility
The Gen AI for Good Challenge: Cities Edition is open to legal residents of the United States and international jurisdictions where permitted by local law, provided that no team member is subject to applicable sanctions or listed on relevant restricted-party lists, including United Nations and United States sanctions lists. Residents of any country or jurisdiction subject to U.S. Treasury Department (OFAC) sanctions are excluded from participation.
Teams and collaboration
Teams must be informal groups of at least two (2) individuals (corporate entities or organisations are ineligible). Every team member must be 18 years of age or older. Only one teammate needs to make a submission on Zindi.
When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the challenge, minus the total number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.
Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be immediately disqualified from the platform.
Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all challenge participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).
The Zindi data scientist who sets up a team is the default Team Leader but they can transfer leadership to another data scientist on the team. The Team Leader can invite other data scientists to their team. Invited data scientists can accept or reject invitations. Until a second data scientist accepts an invitation to join a team, the data scientist who initiated a team remains an individual on the leaderboard. No additional members may be added to teams within the final 5 days of the challenge or last hour of a hackathon.
The team leader can initiate a merge with another team. Only the team leader of the second team can accept the invite. The default team leader is the leader from the team who initiated the invite. Teams can only merge if the total number of members is less than or equal to the maximum team size of the challenge.
A team can be disbanded if it has not yet made a submission. Once a submission is made individual members cannot leave the team.
All members in the team receive points associated with their ranking in the challenge and there is no split or division of the points between team members.
Datasets, packages and general principles
The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only.
You may use the provided datasets and additional datasets listed in AllowedDatasets.csv on the Data page. Additional datasets require organiser approval before use. All sources and licences must be declared.
You may use openly available pretrained models. To process test materials and produce answers, you may use one generative model with no more than 3 billion parameters, with a maximum of 15 model calls and 12,000 generated tokens per question, including thinking, retries and self-checks. Quantisation does not reduce the parameter count.
Other tools for retrieval, OCR, embeddings, reranking, spatial analysis and calculations are permitted, provided they do not invoke additional generative models.
Test questions, Test source materials, their public copies and derivatives, and any answers generated from them must not be used for training, fine-tuning, distillation, self-training, pseudo-labelling or other learned adaptation. Test sources are inference-only. OCR, parsing, indexing, retrieval, spatial analysis and calculations are permitted without training or adapting models on Test materials. Generating answers at inference time for submission is permitted within the stated model limits.
Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.
Each supplied source retains its original licence and attribution requirements, as recorded in SourceManifest.csv. Use and redistribution must comply with those terms and the challenge restrictions on Test materials. No single licence applies to all source materials.
Teams must agree to release their original solution code and documentation under an approved permissive open-source licence (e.g., Apache 2.0, MIT or equivalent), without seeking personal financial gain or patent rights. Third-party datasets, packages and pretrained model weights retain their existing licences and must not be relicensed contrary to those terms. Any released model adaptations must comply with the base model licence.
You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the challenge data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.
Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.
Submissions and winning
You may make a maximum of 1 submission per day.
You may make a maximum of 20 submissions for this challenge.
Before the challenge closes, select two submissions for final evaluation. If you do not make a selection, your two best public leaderboard submissions will be selected automatically.
During the challenge, your best public score will be displayed regardless of the submissions you have selected. After submissions close, organisers will evaluate the withheld questions for your two selected submissions and calculate their full-Test scores using the same scoring method. The better full-Test score will determine your final ranking, subject to eligibility, reproducibility and rule-compliance checks. Final rankings may differ from the public leaderboard.
Note that to count, your submission must first pass processing. If your submission fails during the processing step, it will not be counted and not receive a score; nor will it count against your daily submission limit. If you encounter problems with your submission file, your best course of action is to ask for advice on the challenge page.
If you are in the provisional top 100 after final evaluation, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the Reproducibility of submitted code guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.
If your solution places in the top 100 on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification.
If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).
You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this challenge constitutes your acceptance of these official challenge rules.
Zindi is committed to providing solutions of value to our clients and partners. To this end, we reserve the right to disqualify your submission on the grounds of usability or value. This includes but is not limited to the use of data leaks or any other practices that we deem to compromise the inherent value of your solution.
Zindi also reserves the right to disqualify you and/or your submissions from any challenge if we believe that you violated the rules or violated the spirit of the challenge or the platform in any other way. The disqualifications are irrespective of your position on the leaderboard and completely at the discretion of Zindi.
Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this challenge. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.
Reproducibility of submitted code
If your submitted code does not reproduce your score on the leaderboard, we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the score generated by the code you submitted.
If your code does not run, your solution may be disqualified from advancement. Please make sure your code runs before submitting your solution.
Set random seeds where supported and document all model versions, settings, dependencies and data sources. Code review will check end-to-end reproducibility, source eligibility, the separation of Train and Test materials, and compliance with the model-call and token limits. Organisers may run the submitted solution on fresh cases to verify execution and compliance. A lower accuracy on fresh cases alone is not grounds for disqualification.
Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.
You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.
Read this article on how to prepare your documentation and this article on how to ensure a successful code review.
Consequences of breaking any rules of the challenge or submission guidelines
First offence: No prizes for 6 months and 2000 points will be removed from your profile (probation period). If you are caught cheating, all individuals involved in cheating will be disqualified from the challenge(s) you were caught in and you will be disqualified from winning any challenges for the next six months and 2000 points will be removed from your profile. If you have less than 2000 points to your profile your points will be set to 0.
Second offence: Banned from the platform. If you are caught for a second time your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any challenges or Zindi points using any other account.
Teams with individuals who are caught cheating will not be eligible to win prizes or points in the challenge in which the cheating occurred, regardless of the individuals’ knowledge of or participation in the offence.
Teams with individuals who have previously committed an offence will not be eligible for any prizes for any challenges during the 6-month probation period.
Monitoring of submissions
We will review the top 100 solutions of every challenge when the challenge ends.
We reserve the right to request code from any user at any time during a challenge. You will have 24 hours to submit your code following the rules for code review (see above). Zindi reserves the right not to explain our reasons for requesting code. If you do not submit your code within 24 hours you will be disqualified from winning any challenges or Zindi points for the next six months. If you fall under suspicion again and your code is requested and you fail to submit your code within 24 hours, your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any challenges or Zindi points with any other account.
