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 listing him as a grasp’s scholar in laptop science at Peking College, is the primary writer of considered one of two papers chosen Tuesday for the primary Greatest Paper Award on the Neural Info Processing Programs (NeurIPS) convention, the biggest gathering of machine-learning researchers on the planet.
The paper, titled “Visible Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Picture Technology through Subsequent-Scale Prediction,” presents a brand new technique for creating AI-generated photographs 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 an announcement.
The committee’s choice to grant the glory to Tian, whom ByteDance reportedly sued for over $1 million in damages final month, claiming deliberate sabotage of different firm analysis initiatives, shortly grew to become the main focus of wider discussions on-line about how NeurIPS is run and the best way high AI researchers consider the work of their colleagues. The information additionally brought on 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 greatest paper award to a brilliant problematic work (not first time this has occurred btw),” Abeba Birhane, head of the newly fashioned AI Accountability Lab at Trinity Faculty, wrote on Bluesky. “You’d assume a convention that prides itself on upholding the best scientific & moral commonplace would [do] due diligence earlier than they provide the award to a paper that immediately contradicts their values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS pressured that the glory 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 of all accepted NeurIPS papers equally, and made selections independently primarily based on the scientific advantage of the papers, with out making separate concerns on authorship or different elements, consistent with the NeurIPS blind assessment course of,” it reads.
On Bluesky, Birhane and different AI researchers linked to an nameless GitHub weblog publish that additionally circulated on HackerNews, Reddit, and different platforms in latest days urging the educational AI group to rethink granting the Greatest Paper honor to Tian due to his “severe misconduct,” which it says “basically undermines the core values of integrity and belief upon which our educational group is constructed.”
