The USA-North America AI Olympiad selects U.S. students for the international AI olympiads. The process starts with a proctored written qualifier, followed by an invitational two-day round and a residential national camp where Team USA is chosen.
Registration for the 2027 season is open through 31 January 2027. Round 1 is on 19 February 2027.
How a USAAIO cycle runs, from registration to the contest itself.
Sign up through the Beaver Edge portal. Closes 23:59 EST.
Three hours, from 12:00 to 15:00 EST, proctored in person at a USAAIO test centre.
Invitational, top Round 1 scorers only. Two in-person days - in 2026 these were hosted at Harvard and MIT.
A residential programme of selection tests and lectures. The 2026 camp ran from 8 to 12 June at Harvard.
How the contest works and what the rules allow.
You take a three-hour proctored paper in person. The 2026 set had 24 pages and nine problems. It covered short theory questions, linear algebra and PCA, matrix decomposition, derivatives, vectorised NumPy, token embeddings, CNN feature maps, custom PyTorch modules, and a constrained tabular classification task scored on macro-F1 against hidden test data.
Two in-person days for the top Round 1 scorers, hosted at major universities. Longer modelling problems replace the short-answer format, and the problems come with a published design rationale afterwards.
The camp combines lectures with team selection tests. Results across the TSTs determine who joins Team USA. In the 2026 cycle, eight students were selected for IOAI and four for IAIO.
USAAIO uses PyTorch rather than TensorFlow to match IOAI. Round 1 coding tasks run on CPUs unless a problem says otherwise, and each problem may limit imports. For example, 2026 Problem 9 did not allow deep networks.
Each division follows the official USAAIO syllabus and its problem style.
The mathematics and Python you need before any model makes sense: linear algebra, probability, calculus, and the NumPy/pandas toolchain.
Supervised and unsupervised learning with scikit-learn, plus the evaluation discipline that decides Round 1 scores.
Neural networks in PyTorch, from backpropagation by hand through CNNs, transformers, and generative models.
The topics that separate camp invitations from medals: regularisation theory, multimodal learning, and contest strategy.
USAAIO selects students for the international olympiads below.
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An unofficial study guide, part of OpenIntelligence. Problem materials belong to USAAIO.
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