Former ByteDance Intern Accused of Sabotage Among Winners of Prestigious AI Award | EUROtoday

A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly dismissed for skilled misconduct, together with sabotaging colleagues’ work, was introduced as a winner of one of the vital prestigious annual awards for AI analysis this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages checklist him as a grasp’s scholar in pc science at Peking University, is the primary writer of one among two papers chosen Tuesday for the principle Best Paper Award on the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) convention, the most important gathering of machine-learning researchers on the earth.

The paper, titled “Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction,” presents a brand new methodology for creating AI-generated photos that Tian and 4 coauthors—all affiliated with both ByteDance or Peking University—declare is quicker and extra environment friendly than its predecessors. “The overall quality of the paper presentation, experimental validation and insights (scaling laws) give compelling reasons to experiment with this model,” the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee wrote in a press release.

The committee’s choice to grant the glory 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 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 triggered the main points of a scandal that had been brewing on Chinese social media for weeks to lastly spill over onto the English-language web.

“NeurIPS gave best paper award to a super problematic work (not first time this has happened btw),” Abeba Birhane, head of the newly fashioned AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College, wrote on Bluesky. “You’d think a conference that prides itself on upholding the highest scientific & ethical standard would [do] due diligence before they give the award to a paper that directly contradicts their values.”

A spokesperson for NeurIPS burdened that the glory 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 considered all accepted NeurIPS papers equally, and made decisions independently based on the scientific merit of the papers, without making separate considerations on authorship or other factors, in keeping with the NeurIPS blind review process,” 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 tutorial AI group to rethink granting the Best Paper honor to Tian due to his “serious misconduct,” which it says “fundamentally undermines the core values of integrity and trust upon which our academic community is built.”