ADM+S team wins global LiveRAG Challenge at SIGIR 2025
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Date 20 July 2025
A team from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) at RMIT University has taken out first place in the LiveRAG Challenge at SIGIR 2025, showcasing world-class innovation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies.
The competition drew 70 teams from 27 countries, highlighting the global momentum behind RAG technologies – systems that combine web search and language generation to produce accurate, evidence-backed responses.
The winning team, Dr Oleg Zendel, Dr Damiano Spina, Kun Ran, Shuoqi Sun, and Dinh Anh Khoi Nguyen, impressed judges with their high-quality, well-supported answers and innovative approach.
“This opportunity allowed us to apply our research expertise to a real-world challenge, competing alongside leading research groups,” said Dr Zendel.
The LiveRAG Challenge is hosted by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) and supported by AI71, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Pinecone, and Hugging Face.
During the live event in May, teams had just two hours to answer 500 never-before-seen questions using the same AI model and dataset. The challenge tested how well teams could retrieve useful information and generate accurate, trustworthy answers under pressure.
The ADM+S team’s system was designed to maximise both “Correctness” (accuracy and contextual fit) and “Faithfulness” (how well answers were grounded in retrieved documents).
“The fact that we were able to put together our solution in such a short amount of time is a great example of the dynamic research environment we have at ADM+S,” said Dr Spina.
“Our team, consisting of master’s and PhD students, a research fellow, and a faculty member, brought unique perspectives and expertise that contributed substantially to our success.”
After rigorous automated and manual evaluations, the top three teams were announced:
- 1st Place: RMIT-ADM+S (RMIT University, Australia)
- 2nd Place: RAGtifier (L3S Research Center, Germany)
- 3rd Place: UDInfo (University of Delaware, USA)
The winners received cash prizes of $5,000, $3,000, and $2,000 respectively, presented at the LiveRAG Workshop during SIGIR 2025 in Padua, Italy.
Read the full SIGIR 2025 – LiveRAG Challenge Report and the RMIT-ADM+S technical report
