Moscow, Aug 27: Sber opens registration for AI Journey Contest, an international online artificial intelligence competition. Participants from all corners of the globe will be able to test their skills in solving the most complex challenges in the field and compete for a prize pool that this year exceeded RUB 10 mn.

This season, AIJ Contest 2026 features five tasks from the Sber AI team and the competition's partner, cloud services provider Cloud.ru. Participants can submit solutions either individually or by forming teams of two to four people.

Andrey Belevtsev, senior vice president, head of Technological Development, Sberbank:

"AIJ Contest is one of the most hardcore international AI competitions. Here, professionals test their mettle, and the competition itself demonstrates how rapidly the AI developer community is growing around the world. Last year, 1,500 AI specialists from different countries uploaded 12,000 solutions, which is almost three times the results of 2024. This season, AIJ Contest includes five tasks, which means even more room for choice and solution variations. We invite everyone to test their skills, compete for prizes, and level up their expertise. Fierce competition guarantees an intense battle and an incredible experience."

The first task, Guardian of Truth, challenges participants to build a guardrail that automatically detects contextual hallucinations in an AI agent's response. Such AI agents are being actively integrated into business processes: they respond to users, work with documents and databases, and generate conclusions. However, there is a risk of hallucinations — false data can end up in reports, responses to clients, or management decisions, which can entail financial and reputational costs.

The second task, Green Challenge, is dedicated to developing physical AI models for controlling Sber's anthropomorphic robot, Green. Participants will need to create a model capable of performing mobile manipulation tasks in household and industrial scenarios based on visual observations and instructions. The Green-VLA model, on which Green is being developed, will be provided as a baseline solution, but participants will also be able to use their own solutions.

The third task, 3D DIT Distillation, invites participants to develop an accelerated and optimized version of a 3D object generator based on the Kandinsky 3D baseline solution. Diffusion models are among the key tools of generative AI, and they are successfully used to create images, videos, 3D objects, and other modalities. Their development helps significantly simplify and democratize the processes of creating digital content in both creative and professional tasks.

The fourth task, Vision-Action Data Factory, involves creating a reproducible solution that takes robotic scenarios with images or videos, instructions, and additional information as input, and produces a dataset ready for fine-tuning the open-source robotics model SmolVLA. VLA models help robots understand commands in natural language: they analyze the visual environment, relate it to the assigned task, and produce a sequence of control actions.

The Coordination Referee task, prepared by the competition's partner, Cloud.ru, challenges participants to build a referee model that automatically determines the presence and type of coordination failure between AI agents based on the logs of a completed multi-agent system run. In these systems, tasks are distributed among agents, and even if each one works flawlessly, errors can occur at the interaction level: loss of context during transfer, duplication of operations, mutual blocking, or deviation from the original goal. The model must act as an independent referee and classify the completed run into one of seven coordination types.

Rules and registration are available on the GitVerse AI Cup platform. The competition is open to participants over 18 years of age, and the deadline for submitting solutions is October 20, 2026, inclusive. The awards ceremony for the winners will traditionally take place on stage at AI Journey in Moscow.

AI Journey, an annual international conference organized by Sber, brings together leading professionals in the field of artificial intelligence and focuses on modern AI developments and their impact on scientific achievements, economic development, and social life. AI Journey also promotes innovation-driven technologies among young people. Last year's event featured over 300 speakers from around the world, including from Russia, India, China, and the USA.