QANTA 2026: Efficient, Incremental Multimodal Question Answering

QANTA 2026 is the world’s first multimodal Quizbowl computer competition — questions combine text and images, testing whether AI systems and human players can reason across modalities together.

Building on the human–AI collaboration format introduced in 2025, QANTA 2026 raises the stakes: clues may include photographs, diagrams, artworks, maps, or scientific figures. Expert humans read images naturally — can AI do the same? How much can computers help humans answer questions?

Competition structure

Live matches use two kinds of questions, standard in quiz bowl:

• Tossups are read clue by clue; anyone on either side can interrupt when they think they know the answer. That format rewards knowing when to commit and when to hold back — when to buzz with an answer versus abstaining until more evidence appears. Humans and computer systems both face the same pressure to calibrate confidence under incomplete clues.

• Bonuses are team questions, usually in several parts on a shared theme. They reward depth of knowledge and the ability to weigh explanations and rationales (including from AI teammates) before the captain gives the team’s final answer.

The team that answers a tossup correctly earns the next bonus. For full match flow, interrupt rules, and scoring, see the rules hub and the human and computer rulebooks.

Join the community on Discord.

ICML 2026 Workshop and Publication

You don’t have to submit a paper to our ICML workshop—EMM-QA workshop on efficient multimodal question answering—if you submit a system, but you’re strongly encouraged to! The workshop in Seoul in July will reveal the computer winners, feature analysis, and be an opportunity to discuss your approaches with other system builders.

EMM-QA Workshop at ICML 2026

Call for Papers

Important Dates

Rules and Scoring

The overview explains how tossups and bonuses chain together in a match. Human rules cover table scoring, muting, and live procedures; computer rules cover system outputs and how leaderboards score submissions.

Rules Overview

Human Rules

Computer Rules

Prizes

QANTA 2026 includes prizes across competition tracks:

• Placement awards for top human teams in the live event
• Class-based (i.e., less than 500GB) awards for computer systems, plus special recognition
• Awards for standout questions and packets, plus per-question payments for accepted writing

Prizes and Awards

How to Participate

There are three ways to join QANTA 2026:

Build a Multimodal AI Teammate

Design a system that can interpret both text clues and images to answer quiz bowl questions. AI must handle visual reasoning, OCR, diagram interpretation, and cross-modal fusion — alongside the natural language understanding required for text-only questions.

→ Computer Teams

Play as a Human

Bring your trivia knowledge and visual reasoning skills. Team up with an AI agent to tackle multimodal questions — and help us understand how humans and AI complement each other across modalities.

→ Human Teams

Write Multimodal Questions

Author pyramid-style questions that incorporate images alongside text clues. Receive $5 per accepted question. Questions should be adversarial for AI while remaining solvable by expert humans using the image and text together.

→ For Authors

Contact

Questions about QANTA 2026? Email qanta@googlegroups.com.