A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly dismissed for skilled misconduct, together with sabotaging colleagues’ work, was introduced as a winner of one of the crucial prestigious annual awards for AI analysis this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages checklist him as a grasp’s scholar in pc science at Peking College, is the primary creator of one in every of two papers chosen Tuesday for the primary Greatest Paper Award on the Neural Info Processing Programs (NeurIPS) convention, the largest gathering of machine-learning researchers on the earth.
The paper, titled “Visible Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Picture Era through Subsequent-Scale Prediction,” presents a brand new methodology for creating AI-generated pictures that Tian and 4 coauthors—all affiliated with both ByteDance or Peking College—declare is quicker and extra environment friendly than its predecessors. “The general high quality of the paper presentation, experimental validation and insights (scaling legal guidelines) give compelling causes to experiment with this mannequin,” the NeurIPS Greatest Paper Award committee wrote in a statement.
The committee’s resolution to grant the distinction to Tian, whom ByteDance reportedly sued for over $1 million in damages final month, claiming deliberate sabotage of different firm analysis tasks, shortly grew to become the main target of wider discussions on-line about how NeurIPS is run and the best way prime AI researchers consider the work of their colleagues. The information additionally brought about the main points of a scandal that had been brewing on Chinese language social media for weeks to lastly spill over onto the English-language web.
“NeurIPS gave finest paper award to an excellent problematic work (not first time this has occurred btw),” Abeba Birhane, head of the newly formed AI Accountability Lab at Trinity Faculty, wrote on Bluesky. “You’d suppose a convention that prides itself on upholding the best scientific & moral normal would [do] due diligence earlier than they offer the award to a paper that immediately contradicts their values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS pressured that the distinction was given to the paper, to not Tian himself. They directed WIRED to a portion of the award committee’s statement explaining how the convention evaluates paper submissions. “The search committees thought-about all accepted NeurIPS papers equally, and made selections independently based mostly on the scientific benefit of the papers, with out making separate issues on authorship or different components, in line with the NeurIPS blind overview course of,” it reads.
On Bluesky, Birhane and different AI researchers linked to an nameless GitHub blog post that additionally circulated on HackerNews, Reddit, and different platforms in current days urging the tutorial AI neighborhood to rethink granting the Greatest Paper honor to Tian due to his “critical misconduct,” which it says “essentially undermines the core values of integrity and belief upon which our tutorial neighborhood is constructed.”
