QANTA 2026: AI & Human Quizbowl
When: June 27–28, 2026
Where: University of Maryland and virtual
Who: High school students, undergraduates and graduate students are all invited to participate.
Are you interested in learning more about how humans and AI can work together? The 2026 QANTA multimodal Quizbowl computer competition—which will test whether AI systems and human players can reason across modalities together—is seeking participants.
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?
When to Participate
📆The in-person tournament will take place Saturday, June 27 at the University of Maryland.
📆The online tournament will take place on Sunday, June 28.
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.
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.
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.
The QANTA project at the University of Maryland uses trivia competitions to compare computer systems against each other and expert humans in games of question answering. The aim is to improve question answering: helping computers better answer questions from learning how trivia experts answer questions, helping understand how to explain question answering in human-computer teams, and helping humans author challenging, interesting questions efficiently. Learn More
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS).
