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 prestigious annual awards for AI analysis this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages record him as a grasp’s scholar in pc science at Peking College, is the primary writer of one in all two papers chosen Tuesday for the primary “Greatest Paper Award” on the Neural Data Processing Techniques (NeurIPS) convention, the largest gathering of machine studying researchers on this planet.
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 assertion.
The committee’s resolution to grant the dignity to Tian, whom ByteDance reportedly sued for over $1 million in damages final month, claiming deliberate sabotage of different firm analysis tasks, shortly turned the main target of wider discussions on-line about how NeurIPS is run and the way in which high AI researchers consider the work of their colleagues. The information additionally prompted the small print 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 fashioned AI Accountability Lab at Trinity School, wrote on Bluesky. “You’d suppose a convention that prides itself on upholding the very best scientific & moral customary would [do] due diligence earlier than they offer the award to a paper that straight contradicts their values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS harassed that the dignity was given to the paper, to not Tian himself. They directed WIRED to a portion of the award committee’s assertion explaining how the convention evaluates paper submissions. “The search committees thought-about all accepted NeurIPS papers equally, and made choices independently based mostly on the scientific benefit of the papers, with out making separate issues on authorship or different elements, in step with the NeurIPS blind assessment course of,” it reads.
On Bluesky, Birhane and different AI researchers linked to an nameless GitHub weblog put up that additionally circulated on HackerNews, Reddit, and different platforms in current days urging the educational AI neighborhood to rethink granting the Greatest Paper honor to Tian due to his “severe misconduct,” which it says “essentially undermines the core values of integrity and belief upon which our tutorial neighborhood is constructed.”
