[IJCNN Competition] CfP for EXACT 2026

[Emanuel Di Nardo]

[Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this CFP]

I would like to share an announcement for a competition that our research group is co-organizing. We would greatly appreciate your interest and help in spreading the word.

EXACT 2026 | The 2nd International XAI Challenge for Transparent Educational Question-Answering | IEEE IJCNN 2026 Competition (Remote Partecipation)

EXACT 2026 is the 2nd International XAI Challenge for Transparent Educational Question-Answering, co-organized by Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), VNU-HCM (Vietnam) and the University of Naples Parthenope (Italy), held as part of the IEEE IJCNN 2026 Competition track (IEEE WCCI 2026, Maastricht, The Netherlands).

The challenge asks participants to build AI systems that not only provide accurate answers to educational questions (academic regulations, STEM physics problems on electric circuits and electrostatics) but also generate clear, verifiable explanations for each answer. The first edition at IEEE IJCNN 2025 attracted 107 participants across 30 teams from multiple countries. This year, EXACT 2026 expands into STEM reasoning and introduces upgraded evaluation criteria.

1. ELIGIBILITY AND PARTICIPATION
- Open to everyone: high school students, undergraduates, graduate students, engineers, and researchers worldwide
- Up to 5 members per team (individuals can request team matching from the organizers)
- Interdisciplinary and cross-institutional teams are strongly encouraged

2. DATASETS
- Type 1: 464 records with 913 questions on university regulations, with natural-language premises, FOL annotations, ground-truth answers, and human-written explanations
- Type 2: 5,520 physics problems on electric circuits and electrostatics, with Chain-of-Thought reasoning and numerical answers

3. TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
- Only open-source LLMs with max 8 billion parameters
- Closed-source models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, ...) are strictly prohibited
- All external data used for fine-tuning must be fully disclosed
- Symbolic reasoning (Z3 Solver, custom engines, ...) is encouraged but not mandatory

4. EVALUATION CRITERIA
- P1: Correctness of answers
- P2: Quality of natural-language explanations
- P3: Depth of reasoning (FOL derivations, CoT steps, structured proofs, ...)
Two automated evaluation phases, followed by a live final round before the international Challenge Chairs.

5. INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGE CHAIRS
- Prof. Quan Thanh Tho, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), Vietnam
- Prof. Emanuel Di Nardo, University of Naples Parthenope, Italy
- Prof. Nguyen Duc Anh, University of South-Eastern Norway
- Prof. Fabien Baldacci, University of Bordeaux, France
- Prof. Nguyen Le Minh, JAIST, Japan

6. AWARDS AND PUBLICATION OPPORTUNITIES
+ Top 5: Cash prizes and invited presentation at the 15th International Conference on Computational Data and Social Networks (CSoNet 2026), November 2026 at HCMUT, Vietnam. Papers published by Springer in LNCS/LNAI, indexed by Scopus, DBLP, Web of Science, ACM Digital Library.
+ Top 10: Invited to submit a paper to the Special Session "Explainable AI for Educational QA" at CSoNet 2026.
+ All valid submissions (Phase 1 and 2): Official certificate from the Challenge Chairs and conference organizers.

7. KEY DATES
- Apr 10 to May 10, 2026: Registration open
- May 4, 2026: Kick-off Workshop and dataset release
- May 5 to May 30, 2026: Main competition phase
- Jun 10, 2026: Top 10 announcement
- Jun 15, 2026: Public Test Day (live demo before international jury)
- Jun 30 to Jul 15, 2026: Paper submission (Top 10 teams)
- Nov 16 to 18, 2026: Presentation at CSoNet 2026

8. REGISTER NOW
- Website: https://ura.hcmut.edu.vn/exact
- Registration: https://forms.gle/KuExGZDCFHhwLimB8
- Deadline: May 10, 2026
- Contact: ura....@gmail.com

We would be grateful if you could share this with your colleagues, research groups, and students who may be interested. Thank you very much!