Former ByteDance Intern Accused of Harassment Among Prestigious AI Award Winners

A former ByteDance student who was allegedly fired for misconduct, including destroying a colleague’s work, was announced as the winner of one of the most prestigious annual AI research awards this week. Keyu Tian, ​​whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages are listed as a master of science student at Peking University, is the first author of one of two papers selected on Tuesday for the “Best Paper Award” in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS ) conference, the largest gathering of machine learning researchers in the world.

The paper, titled “Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation 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 fast and efficient. a lot. than the predecessors. “The overall quality of the paper’s presentation, experimental validation and details (scaling rules) provide strong reasons to try this model,” the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee wrote in a statement.

The committee’s decision to give credit to Tian, ​​who ByteDance reportedly sued for more than $1 million in damages last month, seeking the willful destruction of some of the company’s research projects, quickly became the subject of extensive online discussion about how NeurIPS is run and how high -AI. researchers evaluate the work of colleagues. This news also caused that the information about the scam that has been circulating for weeks on social media in China has finally spread on the internet in English.

“NeurIPS gave the best paper award to a work with great problems (not the first time this has happened btw),” Abeba Birhane, head of the AI ​​Accountability Lab at Trinity College, wrote on Bluesky. “You can imagine that it is a conference that prides itself on raising the highest level of science and ethics [do] due diligence before they award a paper that directly contradicts their values. “

A spokesperson for NeurIPS emphasized that credit was given to the paper, not Tian himself. They directed WIRED to a section of the awards committee’s statement that explains how the conference evaluates submissions. “The search committees consider all NeurIPS papers to be equally acceptable, and make decisions independently based on the scientific merit of the papers, without different assumptions about the writing or other aspects, in accordance with the blind review process of NeurIPS,” it reads.

In Bluesky, Birhane and other AI researchers linked to an anonymous GitHub blog that has also been shared on HackerNews, Reddit, and other forums in recent days are urging the academic AI community to reconsider giving Best Paper honors to Tian because “ his egregious behavior,” saying it “fundamentally undermines the principles of integrity and trust upon which our academic community is built.”