A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly fired for professional misconduct, including sabotaging the work of colleagues, was announced this week as the winner of one of the most prestigious annual awards in artificial intelligence research. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar profiles 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 Paper” grand prize in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS ) conference, the largest gathering of machine learning researchers in the world.
The papertitled “Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation Using New Scale Prediction,” it presents a novel method for creating AI-generated images that Tian and four co-authors – all associated with ByteDance or Peking University – say is faster and more effective than its ancestors. “The paper’s overall presentation quality, experimental validation, and insights (scaling laws) provide compelling reasons to experiment with this model,” wrote the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee in statement.
The committee’s decision to award this honor to Tian, who is reportedly being referred to by ByteDance defendant for more than $1 million in damages last month, alleging that he had intentionally sabotaged other companies’ research projects, has quickly become the subject of broader discussions online about how NeurIPS works and how leading artificial intelligence researchers evaluate the work of their colleagues. The news also resulted in details of the scandal that had been brewing for weeks on Chinese social media finally leaking onto the English-language Internet.
“NeurIPS awarded an award for the best extremely problematic paper (this is not the first time this has happened, by the way)” – Abeba Birhane, head newly created AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College, he wrote on Bluesky. “You would think that a conference that prides itself on maintaining the highest scientific and ethical standards would do so [do] due diligence before awarding an award to an article that directly contradicts their values.”
A NeurIPS spokesman emphasized that the honor went to the newspaper, not Tian himself. They referred WIRED to part of the award committee statement explaining how the conference evaluates submitted articles. “The selection committees considered all accepted NeurIPS papers equally and made decisions independently based on the papers’ scientific merit, without separate consideration of authorship or other factors, in accordance with the NeurIPS blind review process,” it says.
On Bluesky, Birhane and other artificial intelligence researchers connected to anonymous GitHub blog post which has also been published on HackerNews, Reddit and other platforms in recent days, calling on the AI academic community to reconsider awarding Tian a Top Paper due to his “serious misconduct” that he says “fundamentally undermines the core values of honesty and trust on which our academic community is built.”