Frequently Asked Questions
Last Updated: November 3, 2026
Answers to common questions about the LRAC 2.0 Challenge will be added here as they arise. You may also find the LRAC 1.0 (2025) FAQs helpful for topics not yet covered here.
Table of Contents
Models and Training Data
Q: May we use the official LRAC 2.0 baseline pretrained weights even though they were released after the Challenge start date?
A: Yes. The official LRAC 2.0 baseline models and pretrained weights may be used as a starting point for further fine-tuning, even though they were released after the Challenge start date.
This is a specific exception for the official LRAC 2.0 baseline; it does not extend to other pretrained models released after the Challenge start date. Any further fine-tuning must use only datasets permitted under the Challenge rules. Entries derived from the baseline must also satisfy all applicable track constraints and submission requirements.
Memory Bandwidth Calculation
Q: How should weights that are reused multiple times within one temporal frame be counted in the memory-bandwidth calculation?
A: Under the Track 2 convention, a weight tensor is counted once per logical invocation of its layer for each temporal frame. Reuse of the weights across spatial positions within a single invocation does not cause the weights to be counted again.
For example, if a convolutional layer is invoked once per 10-ms STFT frame and applies the same weights across all frequency-bin positions, its weights are counted once at a layer frame rate of 100 frames/s—not once per frequency-bin position. The number of positions must still be included in the layer’s compute-complexity calculation.
If the same weight tensor is invoked multiple times at distinct stages or passes through the processing pipeline, it must be counted once for each invocation. This applies even when the weights are tied and count only once toward the model’s parameter total. For example, if a ConvNeXt block with shared weights is invoked three times per temporal frame, its weights—and any other persistent parameters accessed by the block—must be counted three times for memory-bandwidth purposes.
This is an architecture-level logical-access convention. Whether a particular implementation might retain weights in a hardware cache across separate invocations does not change the challenge calculation. See the Track 2 memory-bandwidth penalty documentation for the complete calculation convention.
System Reports & Invited Papers
Q: If our team is invited to submit a paper to the ICASSP 2027 SPGC session, must its author list exactly match our registered team?
A: Not necessarily. The invited paper’s author list may differ from your registered team, since it reflects work done after the Challenge concludes. A registered member who did not contribute may be omitted, and anyone who made a meaningful contribution – including someone who joins later, e.g. for post-challenge analysis – should be listed as an author.
Authorship should follow the standard IEEE authorship criteria; the organizers do not impose additional restrictions, deadlines, or approval procedures for author changes.
Note that this flexibility applies to the invited paper only. For the system report submitted alongside your Entry, authors should match your registered team: a registered member who ends up not contributing may be dropped, but adding authors outside the registered team is not appropriate there.
One constraint applies regardless of authorship: the invited paper must describe the system your team actually submitted to the Challenge, not an unrelated topic.
If you have further questions, please reach out to us: lrac-challenge@cisco.com