[RecSys 2026] First Call for RecSys Challenge
Noemi Mauro
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce the Call for RecSys Challenge for ACM RecSys 2026, the leading conference on recommender systems, taking place September 28 – October 2, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
The RecSys Challenge 2026: Music-CRS focuses on the evolving landscape of music discovery, where static recommendation lists are being replaced by dynamic, conversational interactions. As users increasingly interact with AI through natural language, there is a critical need for systems that can seamlessly integrate Natural Language Understanding (NLU) with high-precision Recommender Systems (RecSys). This challenge aims to push the boundaries of how AI understands nuanced user preferences, explores musical tastes through dialogue, and provides contextually relevant track recommendations.
By utilizing the TalkPlayData-Challenge dataset, a large-scale conversation resource generated through an advanced agentic pipeline, we invite the global research community to tackle the complexities of multi-turn preference elicitation. As a research community-driven initiative, the challenge dataset features LLM-generated multi-turn dialogues paired with music metadata and user-item interaction data derived from publicly available research datasets. No SiriusXM or Deezer user data is included in the dataset. This challenge serves as a bridge between the NLP and RecSys communities, fostering next-generation innovation in interactive and personalized music information retrieval.
The evaluation is designed to reflect both recommendation quality and response quality. The shared task materials identify ranking quality as a core evaluation component, while the overall challenge framing emphasizes the importance of interactive, personalized, and explainable recommendation behavior. The Prize will be $1000 for the First Team from the participants, and $1000 for the First Academic Team.
A detailed description of the task, dataset resources, baseline materials, and submission format is available on the following pages:
RecSys 2026 Challenge Website: https://www.recsyschallenge.com/2026/
RecSys 2026 Website: https://recsys.acm.org/recsys26/challenge/
We encourage you to participate in the ACM RecSys Challenge 2026. Looking forward to your contributions!
Best regards,
Noemi Mauro and Pan Li
On behalf of the ACM RecSys 2026 Organizing Committee