A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly dismissed for skilled misconduct, together with sabotaging colleagues’ work, was introduced as a winner of some of the prestigious annual awards for AI analysis this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages checklist him as a grasp’s pupil in laptop science at Peking College, is the primary creator of certainly one of two papers chosen Tuesday for the principle “Greatest Paper Award” on the Neural Info Processing Methods (NeurIPS) convention, the biggest gathering of machine studying 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 photos 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 determination to grant the consideration to Tian, whom ByteDance reportedly sued for over $1 million in damages final month, claiming deliberate sabotage of different firm analysis initiatives, shortly turned the main focus of wider discussions on-line about how NeurIPS is run and the way in which prime 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 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 School, wrote on Bluesky. “You’d suppose a convention that prides itself on upholding the very best scientific & moral commonplace would [do] due diligence earlier than they offer the award to a paper that immediately contradicts their values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS confused that the consideration 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 selections independently primarily based on the scientific advantage 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 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 “critical misconduct,” which it says “essentially undermines the core values of integrity and belief upon which our educational group is constructed.”