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A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly fired for professional misconduct, including sabotaging the work of colleagues, was announced as the winner of one of the most prestigious annual awards for AI research this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages list him as a master’s student in computer science at Peking University, is the first author of one of the two papers selected Tuesday for the prize of the main Best Paper in the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference. him the biggest meeting of machine-learning researchers in the world.
U papertitled “Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction,” presents a new method for creating AI-generated images that Tian and four co-authors—all affiliated with ByteDance or Peking University—claim to be faster and more efficient than his. predecessors. “The overall quality of the paper presentation, the experimental validation and the insights (scaling laws) give compelling reasons to experiment with this model,” wrote the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee. declaration.
The committee’s decision to award the honor to Tian, ByteDance said sued for more than $1 million in damages last month, claiming deliberate sabotage of other company research projects, has quickly become the focus of broader discussions online about how NeurIPS is run and how superior it is. AI researchers evaluate the work of their colleagues. The news also caused details of a scandal that had been brewing on Chinese social media for weeks to finally spread on the English-language internet.
“NeurIPS has given the best paper prize to a super problematic work (not the first time this happened anyway),” Abeba Birhane, head of the new format AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College, he wrote on Bluesky. “You might think that a conference that prides itself on maintaining the highest scientific and ethical standards would do some due diligence before awarding a prize to a paper that directly contradicts its values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS said the honor was given to the paper, not Tian himself. They directed WIRED to part of the awards committee declaration explaining how the conference evaluates paper submissions. “The research committees considered all accepted NeurIPS papers equally, and made decisions independently based on the scientific merit of the papers, without making separate considerations on authorship or other factors, in accordance with the blind review process of NeurIPS,” it read.
In Bluesky, Birhane and other AI researchers linked to an anonymous GitHub blog post which has also circulated on HackerNews, Reddit and other platforms in recent days urging the AI academic community to reconsider awarding the Best Paper honor to Tian due to his “gross misconduct “, which he says “fundamentally undermines the core values of integrity and trust.” that our academic community is built on.”