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A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly fired for professional misconduct, including sabotaging the work of colleagues, was announced this week as the winner of one of the most prestigious annual awards in AI research, Keiyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages He is listed as a computer science master’s student at Peking University as the first author of one of two papers selected Tuesday by the chief of Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) For the “Best Paper” award: conference, is the largest gathering in the world of machine learning researchers.
It paper“Visual Autoregressive Modeling. Titled Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction, it presents a new method for generating AI-generated images that Tian and four co-authors, all affiliated with ByteDance or Peking University, claim are faster and more efficient. than its predecessors. “The overall quality of the paper’s presentation, experimental validation, and insights (scaling laws) provide compelling reasons to test this model,” wrote the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee. statement.
The committee’s decision to bestow the honor on Tian, according to ByteDance sued Last month for more than $1 million in damages after claiming deliberate sabotage of another company’s research projects, it quickly became the focus of a wider debate online about how NeurIPS works and how it stacks up. AI researchers evaluate the work of their colleagues. The news also meant that details of a scandal that had been brewing on Chinese social media for weeks finally leaked onto the English-language Internet.
“NeurIPS awarded the best paper prize to a highly challenging work (not the first time this happened yesterday) – Abeba Birhane, head of the organization. newly created AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College, wrote On Bluesky. “You would think that a conference that prides itself on maintaining the highest scientific and ethical standards would do due diligence before awarding an award to a paper that directly contradicts their values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS emphasized that the honor was given to the paper, not Tian himself.They referred WIRED to part of the award committee statement explaining how the conference evaluates paper submissions. “The search committees considered all accepted NeurIPS papers equally and made decisions independently based on the scientific merit of the articles without separate considerations of reputation or other factors, in line with the NeurIPS blind review process,” – it says.
At Bluesky, Birhane and other AI researchers are linked to an anonymous GitHub blog post which has also circulated on HackerNews, Reddit and other platforms in recent days, urging the academic AI community to reconsider awarding Tian the “Best Paper” award due to his “serious misconduct” which he said “fundamentally undermines the integrity and the core values of trust on which our academic community is built.”
