Former ByteDance intern accused of sabotage among winners of prestigious AI award

A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly fired for professional misconduct, including sabotaging his colleagues’ work, was announced this week as the winner of one of the most prestigious annual awards for AI research. 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 chosen Tuesday for the top prize for best paper at the Neural conference Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). the largest gathering of machine learning researchers in the world.

He paperTitled “Autoregressive Visual Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction,” it 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 its predecessors. “The overall quality of the paper presentation, experimental validation, and insights (scaling laws) provide compelling reasons to experiment with this model,” the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee wrote in a statement.

The committee’s decision to award the honor to Tian, ​​whom ByteDance reportedly defendant for more than $1 million in damages last month, alleging deliberate sabotage of the company’s other research projects, quickly became the focus of broader online discussions about how NeurIPS is handled and how top AI researchers They 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 finally spread to the English-language Internet.

“NeurIPS awarded the best article prize to a super problematic work (by the way, this is not the first time this has happened),” Abeba Birhane, director of the newly formed AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College, wrote in Blue Sky. “You would think that a conference that prides itself on maintaining the highest scientific and ethical standards would do due diligence before awarding the prize to a paper that directly contradicts its values.”

A NeurIPS spokesperson stressed that the honor was awarded to the newspaper, not Tian himself. Part of awards committee directed to WIRED statement explaining how the conference evaluates paper submissions. “The search committees considered all accepted NeurIPS articles equally and made decisions independently based on the scientific merit of the articles, without making separate considerations of authorship or other factors, in accordance with the NeurIPS blind review process “, it reads.

At Bluesky, Birhane and other AI researchers linked to an anonymous GitHub blog post which also circulated on HackerNews, Reddit, and other platforms in recent days urging the academic AI community to reconsider awarding the Best Paper honor to Tian due to his “serious misconduct,” which it says “fundamentally undermines the values fundamentals of integrity and trust on which our academic community is built.”