A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly dismissed for skilled misconduct, together with sabotaging colleagues’ work, was introduced as a winner of probably the most prestigious annual awards for AI analysis this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages listing 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 principle Finest Paper Award on the Neural Info Processing Programs (NeurIPS) convention, the largest gathering of machine-learning researchers on this planet.
The paper, titled “Visible Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Picture Technology 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 Finest Paper Award committee wrote in a statement.
The committee’s choice 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 tasks, rapidly turned the main target 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 induced 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 a brilliant problematic work (not first time this has occurred btw),” Abeba Birhane, head of the newly formed AI Accountability Lab at Trinity School, wrote on Bluesky. “You’d suppose a convention that prides itself on upholding the very best scientific & moral normal would [do] due diligence earlier than they provide the award to a paper that straight contradicts their values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS careworn that the consideration 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 of all accepted NeurIPS papers equally, and made selections independently primarily based on the scientific benefit of the papers, with out making separate issues on authorship or different elements, in step with the NeurIPS blind evaluation 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 latest days urging the tutorial AI group to rethink granting the Finest 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 group is constructed.”
Source link
