A former ByteDance intern accused of sabotage among the winners of a prestigious artificial intelligence award

A former ByteDance intern, who was allegedly fired for professional misconduct, including sabotaging his colleagues’ work, was announced as the winner of one of the most prestigious annual awards for artificial intelligence research this week. Keyu Tian, ​​whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages list him as a master’s student in computer science at Peking University, is the first author of one of two papers selected Tuesday for the Best Main Paper Award at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, the The largest gathering Machine learning researchers in the world.

the papertitled “Automatic Visual Modeling: Creating Scalable Images via Next Scale Prediction,” presents a new method for creating AI-generated images that Tian and four co-authors — all affiliated with ByteDance or Peking University — claim is faster and more efficient than . ancestor. “The overall quality of the paper’s presentation, experimental validation and insights (measurement laws) give compelling reasons to try this model,” the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee wrote in a report. statement.

The committee’s decision to award the honor to Tian, ​​who was reportedly awarded by ByteDance File a lawsuit against To receive more than $1 million in damages last month, for allegedly intentionally sabotaging other of the company’s research projects, it quickly became the focus of broader online discussions about how NeurIPS operates and how best. Artificial intelligence researchers Evaluate the work of their colleagues. The news also caused details of a scandal that had been brewing on Chinese social media for weeks to spread to the English-language internet.

“NeurIPS awarded the Best Paper award for a very problematic work (not the first time this has happened, by the way),” Abiba Birhan, Department Head Newly formed Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab at Trinity College books On bluesky. “You would think that a conference that prides itself on upholding the highest scientific and ethical standards would do its due diligence before awarding an award to research that is in direct conflict with its values.”

A NeurIPS spokesperson stressed that the honor was given to the newspaper, not to Tian himself. They directed WIRED to part of the award committee statement Explain how the conference evaluates paper submissions. “The search committees considered all accepted NeurIPS papers equally, and made their decisions independently based on the scientific merit of the papers, without making separate considerations of authorship or other factors, in keeping with NeurIPS’s blind review process,” the report states.

At Bluesky, Birhane and other AI researchers linked to an anonymous GitHub site Blog post Which has also been circulating on HackerNews, Reddit and other platforms in recent days urging the academic AI community to reconsider awarding the Best Paper Award to Tian due to his “serious misconduct,” which he says “fundamentally undermines the core values ​​of integrity and trust in society.” On which our academic community was built.”