MIREX HOME

Welcome to MIREX 2026

MIREX (Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange) is an annual community evaluation campaign held in conjunction with the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR). This year, the conference will be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE from November 8–12, 2026, and may include an online component.

In a long run, we want to make MIREX a platform for researchers to share their latest research results, to compare their systems with others, and to promote the development of the field.

Call for Challenges

We invite the ISMIR community to propose new research challenges that address cutting-edge problems in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). These challenges should aim to push the boundaries of current research and foster innovation in the field. We also welcome challenge sponsors from both industry and research institutions, particularly those willing to contribute datasets and computational resources to support the competition.

For the format and requirements for the challenge proposal, please go to 2026:Call for Challenges.

Task Captain Responsibilities:

• Register on the MIREX Wiki and maintain a task description page.
• Collect submissions via the MIREX submission server (or provide customized submission instructions).
• Execute and evaluate the submissions.
• Report results to MIREX and create a results page on the MIREX Wiki.
• (Optional) Present a MIREX task captain poster at the Late-Breaking and Demo (LBD) session at ISMIR 2026.

What's new:

In MIREX 2026, we introduce two special calls for challenges:

1. Novel evaluation pipelines

There is a growing need for new evaluation methodologies. We welcome challenge proposals that introduce novel evaluation pipelines, including but not limited to the evaluation of generative models, interactive systems, and other emerging paradigms.

2. Evaluation under limited resources

In addition to state-of-the-art systems, MIREX aims to better support researchers and research areas with limited resources. We welcome challenge proposals that focus on underrepresented research areas, music genres, or research communities.

Furthermore, all task captains are encouraged to report key resource indicators for each submission, including:

• training data size
• model size
• other computational resources used in model development

How to Participate

See also the general Submission Guidelines.

• Read the Participant Agreement and task description carefully.
• Program your system.
• Write a 2-4 page extended abstract PDF describing your system.
• Submit your system and extended abstract to the MIREX submission site.
• Top-performing teams will have the opportunity to present their MIREX posters at the LBD session at ISMIR 2026.

Important Dates

• Challenge proposals due: May 15, 2026
• Notification of acceptance: May 29, 2026
• Submission open: Jul 1, 2026
• Submission close: Oct 1, 2026 (Some tasks may have a different deadline; see task descriptions)
• Result published: Oct 15, 2026 (Some tasks may have a different deadline; see task descriptions)

Contact Us

Email

For general questions, feedback, and suggestions, please send messages to our mailing list future-mirex@googlegroups.com.

For task-specific questions, we have listed the email for each task captain here.

Discord Server

For real-time discussion with the MIREX organizers or task captains, you may join our discord server.

Notice: some task captains are not in the discord server.

Repositories

Open-source evaluation pipelines: https://github.com/ismir-mirex/mirex-evaluation

Github organization: https://github.com/ismir-mirex/

LinkedIn Organization Page

You may visit our LinkedIn organization page here.

We are looking forward to seeing you at MIREX 2026!

Future MIREX Team, 2026

MIREX 2026 Organizers:

• Junyan Jiang, New York University
• Gus Xia, MBZUAI
• Akira Maezawa, Yamaha
• Ziyu Wang, New York University
• Yixiao Zhang, ByteDance Inc.
• Ruibin Yuan, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
• J. Stephen Downie, University of Illinois