A former ByteDance intern allegedly fired for skilled misconduct, together with sabotaging colleagues’ work, was introduced this week because the winner of probably the most prestigious annual awards for synthetic intelligence analysis. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages checklist him as a grasp’s pupil in pc science at Peking University, is the primary creator of certainly one of two papers chosen Tuesday for the highest “Best Paper Award” at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) convention, the biggest gathering of machine studying researchers on the earth.
THE papertitled “Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation by way of Next-Scale Prediction,” presents a brand new technique for creating AI-generated photos that Tian and 4 co-authors, all affiliated with ByteDance or Peking University, declare is quicker and effectivity of his technique. predecessors. “The general high quality of the paper’s presentation, experimental validation, and insights (legal guidelines of scaling) present compelling causes to check this mannequin,” the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee wrote in a declaration.
The committee’s choice to grant the distinction to Tian, ByteDance reported sued for greater than $1 million in damages final month, alleging deliberate sabotage of different company analysis initiatives, has shortly grow to be the main target of bigger discussions on-line about how NeurIPS is run and the way high AI researchers consider the work of their colleagues. The information additionally meant that particulars of a scandal that had been simmering on Chinese social media for weeks lastly spilled onto the English-language Internet.
“NeurIPS awarded the perfect paper award to extraordinarily problematic work (this isn’t the primary time this has occurred),” Abeba Birhane, head of newly formed AI Accountability Laboratory at Trinity College, he wrote on Bluesky. “You would assume {that a} convention that prides itself on upholding the best scientific and moral requirements would (do) its due diligence earlier than awarding the prize to an article that straight contradicts their values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS burdened that the distinction was given to the newspaper, to not Tian himself. They referred WIRED to a part of the awards committee declaration clarify how the convention evaluates the submitted papers. “The search committees thought of all accepted NeurIPS articles equally and made selections independently based mostly on the scientific benefit of the articles, with out making separate issues of authorship or different components, in step with the NeurIPS blind assessment course of “, we learn.
On Bluesky, Birhane and different AI researchers linked to an nameless GitHub blog article which has additionally been circulating on HackerNews, Reddit and different platforms in latest days, urging the tutorial AI group to rethink granting the Best Paper award to Tian as a result of his “severe misconduct,” which he says “essentially undermines the core values of integrity and belief upon which our educational group is constructed.”
