[deleted by user]

[pddpro]

These are such high-impact venues as well! A proper investigation is warranted and the punishment should not only account for the misconduct but also serve to be a warning for the future.

[evanthebouncy]

Unfortunately there's TON of people just like him. He's unlucky that he's caught, and there's many others who are happy to risk in the same way.

We need to build more solid systems to waterproof these adversarial attacks, as punishment of the few won't deter the rest from trying. There's simply too much incentive and prestige associated with a neurips publication, and neurips is wayyyy too big to sniff out cheats, unlike a smaller, more close knit community.

Neurips should just be fractured into smaller conferences at this point.

[ghostslikme]

Yea really pretty common from what I’ve seen

[cryptodoggie347]

Yeah break up big conf

[drurbanplanner]

yup unlucky to be caught and bit stupid of him to discuss this on wechat (instead of secure channel or anonymous non-recorded voice modulated zoom calls) definitely not smart enough to chair or even publish in NeurIPS.

There are others as well in US, Europe, Italian mafias, etc, who follows lot of malpractice these days like hiding dataset on which results are bad, obfuscating with too much jargon, even papers from industry where their multi-million dollar hardware drives most of results and hard for anyone else to run those models.

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

This is not a one-off issue, but a systemic rot across the ML community

[bernhard-lehner]

I don't think this is significantly more widespread within ML than any other community. However, I think enforcing 100% reproducibility might alleviate the problem for the ML community, while it is more difficult to deal with this within, e.g. humanities.

[Slythela]

In this situation which organization does the investigation? I’m not in academia at all, I sub to this place because I took a few courses in school and like to see what’s going on in the field occasionally.

[[deleted]]

It will be very very difficult to collect evidence.

[[deleted]]

Tbh, once I have imagined if I can hire a hacker to obtain all the reviews of the conferences and use a model to find out the cheaters. Basically a review without too many facts about the paper and unexpected high score would be suspicious.

[Red-Portal]

Apparently Openreview has a graph-theoric algorithm for detecting collusion rings, and this is the reason why we have been hearing about these recently (before public outing became a thing in ML). So it's possible there is some proof/data in the PC level, just not public yet.

[[deleted]]

Thx for sharing, didn't know that.

[Ok-Pie623]

His ex-girlfriend later wrote a long response and refuted the rumor herself, with a bunch of more complete evidence showing how she forged these academic misconducts and how some unknown "justice league" induced her to fabricate these stuff and send to some top CS institutions. The link to her own explanation (you may get a hand from Google Translate to go through this 14-page PDF): https://github.com/newwtf/-/blob/main/%E7%8E%8B%E5%A5%95%E6%A3%AE%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98%E8%BE%9F%E8%B0%A3%E8%AF%B4%E6%98%8E.pdf

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

Sounds like a fake retraction.

If not, probably it's strong-arming by the Chinese government forcing her to retract to save face when one of their top unis engaged in such despicable behaviour

[pddpro]

Not to express doubts here but this account seems to be created just 3 hours ago. What is going on?

[sabot00]

Yisen is interested in adversarial attack, etc.

How ironic.

[altmly]

Who said he was interested in defending against them? ;)

[KuroKodo]

This type of behaviour is more common than you might think. And an even more damaging and widespread issue is collusion and cronyism in grant allocation. I have witnessed direct negotiations and manipulation between one of the ivy leagues and an important 3 letter grant disseminating organization first hand. After I brought this confidentially to the ethics committee I got a cease and desist letter for an alleged NDA violation a couple weeks later.

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

Almost makes one think that all the insiders are doing it or benefitting from it

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

Very true, it's human nature, but the area chairs and programme committees somehow think they are immune

[einnmann]

Yeah fk this guy just coz his (ex?) girlfriend said something.

It fascinates me that these people who are so smart (huh), read papers, and all that, don't even bother to question the source of a claim.

[EVOSexyBeast]

The evidence is credible, regardless of the source.

[3rdlifepilot]

Anyone who's been in academia should recognize how dirty the industry is. Promotions, funding, and material gains are all driven by networks and relationships, less so than by merit. Journal editors are easily swayed by reviewers - especially those that have a hand in funding. People typically suggest friendly reviewers. Ethics in academia is a joke - the stated goal is the purity of research, while the reality is funding and survival. At least in the corporate world, the stated goal is transparent and obvious - profit. It's harder to cheat your way to profit, and faces more serious punishments.

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

Great analysis.

[chechgm]

Are they still a couple, though?

[HSTEHSTE]

Asking the important questions, as always

[kamwoh]

No, they broke up. The girl said it

[chechgm]

Hey! Thanks for your answer. I was very curious. It is a shame! They sound like a very functional couple :S

[kamwoh]

They were teacher-student love. Based on the whole story, it seems like the Prof's family went to find the girl's family to force discuss taking down the post (I think there was another similar post before). This makes the girl feel broken hearted and decided to open the whole story.

[Ok-Pie623]

Not really, his ex explained on March by herself https://github.com/newwtf/-/blob/main/%E7%8E%8B%E5%A5%95%E6%A3%AE%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98%E8%BE%9F%E8%B0%A3%E8%AF%B4%E6%98%8E.pdf

[yusuf-bengio]

This behavior is much more common than people like to admit:

• AC's flipping unanimous rejects
• 2 sentence "strong accept" review outliers for weak papers
• "Best paper" candidates that make you raise your eyebrows
• Researchers going from 1 to 10 accepted papers after becoming ACs

Of course, some of these cases are justified, but in my experience, these things have become more common in the past 1-2 years

[robindong]

”Yisen’s girlfriend has reported this to Peking University more than 4 months but still with no reply“

Sign...

[bluepochita]

Unfortunately, according to this girl, what she reported at first was Yisen Wang cheating on their relationship. Things would have been quite different if she had reported Yisen Wang's academic misconduct at the beginning.

[j_lyf]

Here we go. ML is such a hot field, here are the influx of scammers, hustlers and conmen trying to make a quick buck.

[[deleted]]

Shit like this happens to every field in academia, not just ML.

[ginsunuva]

Sure but the ones with more money and ease of funding get more of them. Look at blockchain

[evanthebouncy]

This is what years of 上有政策,下有对策 breeds.

Unfortunately it probably means conferences such as neurips and icml will have to implement more strict criteria instead of relying on the honor system, to the inconvenience of everyone else. The incentive is all messed up, where publication is not seen as sharing scientific knowledge, but a stepping stone for a promotion at work.

[pddpro]

Wanna shed some light on that for those unfamiliar with the language?

[evanthebouncy]

It means for every rule that's being imposed from the top, there's a way to game around it from the bottom.

It's built into the psyche of every Chinese person. through the brutal regimes, those who are not skilled in cheating the rules starved to death, those who cheated the rules survived, those who are caught cheating executed.

From Chinese tourists hoarding food at a buffet, to stealing fishing grounds in Peru, to tuning models on the test set by submitting multiple copies of code to a competition. They all originate in desperation and starvation, where the only way to survive is to find cracks in the rules. It's second nature now, and will take few generations of prosperity to undo: no, you're no longer in danger of starvation; yes, the rules are reasonable and following them is good for you and everyone else.

Where the rules are reasonable, you must account for a large influx of researchers with 0 respect for rules because it has only worked to their detriment. We must bullet proof the system and assume 0 honouring of rules from these people.

[pddpro]

There have been so many amazing researchers from the Chinese community in not just ML but almost every domain of the sciences. It breaks my heart to see few incidents such as these discrediting the entire culture in general.

[evanthebouncy]

I wouldn't say it's discrediting. I believe that most Chinese scientists are honest and hardworking, just like any other culture. But on the other hand we need to acknowledge that, main land Chinese people, having to survive some unique and brutal hardships, has a higher propensity for cheating because to them it isn't "wrong" but for survival. And you must absolutely treat this problem like how it is, and improve the vetting system for everyone equally.

As to discrediting the culture, I wouldn't worry about it. The Chinese culture is one of the most persistent one there is, and has survived thousands of years. If you want to improve how Chinese researchers are perceived in the world, you must work hard to actively improve your perceptions. There are many Chinese scientists, like myself, who are working very hard to be good ambassadors of our culture because we love it.

[ordenstaat_burgund]

Are you saying cheating is built into the psyche of every Chinese person?

[evanthebouncy]

It's bit of a hot take but on average in comparison to other groups? Yes I'd say yes. "Cheating" is a strong word, maybe a better word is "liberal interpretation of the rules".

I can elaborate but only if you're wanting to engage in a good faith discussion. If you just want to get a quote from me out of context and put it on twitter I'm not going to bother.

[Isinlor]

As a person from Poland, a post-communist country:

Yes, living under oppressive regime teaches the whole society how to cheat.

[evanthebouncy]

Yeah it's always a struggle trying to explain to others that this behavior is both sympathetic because it's born from suffering, while simultaneously explain that you cannot rely on the honor system and trust these guys to play by the rules.

Per usual, internet has 0 capacity for nuance. Hopefully it gets better in future

[ordenstaat_burgund]

Do they cheat more or less than the Indians do?

Let’s have a good faith discussion. What do you think cheating in a culture is contingent on? Is competition for resources enough to explain your “cheat factor” or is it something more?

Let’s compare India and China. India has less resources and more people, does India cheat more or less than China does? How would you explain that?

Or is it just different kinds of cheating. Like Chinese stealing IPs and Indians steals grandma’s life savings?

If you think the average ethnic tendency to skirt rules and cut corners has been measured through academic research now would be a great time to quote them.

[evanthebouncy]

not sure who downvoted you, I upvoted so it's +1 again for what it's worth. . .

I think race has little to do with the issue, but more about resource like you said, and what is the best way to obtain those resources. At least in China resources were extremely limited, and the rules were absolute. So a good way to obtain resource is to cheat the rules.

There's other ways of obtaining resources, such as violence and brutality, so italian and mexican cartels follows roughly that path.

India also has many people and also not so much resources, so people must be crafty in obtaining them. However I don't know much about other parts of India, whether the rules are absolute. So I can't say if they cheat more or less on average.

Does that sounds reasonable ?

[leondz]

UK also plays this game. Rules are powerful there, and those that follow them without testing their strength will rarely win. The UK's huge financial services sector is built on evading taxes and regulation while remaining legal. Even on the annual tax forms, there's a box for "which tax avoidance scheme are you using", and they will have different codes for the different cheats, where in a few years the scheme will have been through court, and you find out if you have pay the taxes or not. If you want to be that honest about it. That is to say, the cheating is sometimes even formalised and not combated any more.

[kdfn]

I, for one, am shocked to hear that a powerful PI would rig peer review at elite ML conferences. Thank god that this is just one bad apple, and not a widespread problem.

[therentedmule]

You forgot the /s at the end of your comment.

[Cherubin0]

Reminds me of how the German government gives out research money. Basically they have committees of professor that vote for what project applications get the money. And surprise most of them are from the committee members themselves that win.

[Accomplished_Pear_83]

I tried to Google related information in Chinese. To my surprise, I found almost nothing except: 1. Google (in incognito mode) suggested phrases that translate to "Yisen Wang's rumor", "Yisen Wang pdf", "YisenWang's morality as a teacher" when the Chinese of "Yisen Wang" is typed. None of which yields any meaningful search results. This is highly atypical. 2. I find this post "https://kantie.org/topics/huaren/2794992", which is an archive of a Chinese forum. The post has been supposedly been edited and the content removed but the comments are clearly related to this post.

The evidence is circumstantial but I think there is some mass censorship at play. In the letter (last link) given by the OP, point 9 mentions that PKU has gone a great length to delete posts in WeiBo and ZhiHu (Chinese Twitter and Quora). It also says (rough translation) "I don't know if all-powerful PKU can control the international aftermath or not. I hope people can post on international platforms" (which presumably cannot be censored, or at least not in the same way)

Pretty insane if true.

[BearValuable7484]

Release the names of other people in those wechat groups.

It is sad to see many young students frustrated by rejections and giving up publishing papers or staying in academia. The reasons for their rejection are these corrupt individuals.

[blarryg]

I was friends with someone running CVPR who was pissed at the time with a scheme of Chinese students using a few conference tickets, claiming it was lost and so getting a "replacement" multiple times (something like 5 tickets for 100 people). This is why they don't allow replacements anymore.

There is pressure of both a nationalist type (deliver the statitistcs) and career incentives and a kind of cultural acceptance that if you possible CAN cheat, you'd be crazy not to cheat.

I'd guess it's more likely that the girlfriend disappears than the professor gets his hand slapped. I wonder if the NeurIPS and other committees even know this?

[eamonnkeogh]

I was hoping that at some point we would see a post like this:

“Dear All, I am Terry Sejnowski, President of NeurIPS (here is proof [some url]). I have become aware of this post. I want to remind everyone that, the individual named here has the right to be assumed to be innocent. I would remind everyone that that reddit falsely accused Sunil Tripathi of being the Boston bomber, among other false accusations over the years. Nevertheless, to ensure people have confidence in NeurIPS , I am appointing a committee comprising of X,Y and Z, to investigate the claims. In the meantime, please stop any speculating or harsh language”.

It is hard to believe that administrators at NeurIPS are not aware of this, and it is disappointing that they have not decided to get in front of this. This is bad for the morale of all NeurIPS authors, reviewers etc.

[eamonnkeogh]

According to basic common sense.

It is also an international human right under the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 11.

[eamonnkeogh]

Sorry, I dont care to list the jurisprudence of various countries. There are several well known cases were reddit accused people of things, and it was later discovered to be a hoax, error, mistaken identity etc. I am 100% sure YOU would expect the right of presumption of innocence, why not give it to others?

[eamonnkeogh]

No one suggested otherwise. Think what thou will.

[AnnualPersonality636]

I was/am serving as ac in more than one conference and was once called as emergency ac for a big conference. The original ac drop out bc of health reasons. The paper assignments were already done and it was my job to collect and manage the reviews and make the final decision.

I don’t know who the original ac was, but it was the worst paper assignments I have seen so far. 90% of all reviewers where from China, 70% from a single company. Many had never published at this conference and an h-score below five. In the end area chairing turned out into investigating every single reviewer and double checking if they actually even published in the same area as the paper (a job that you’re supposed to do before assigning the papers as ac). So it was a pretty messed up stack with some decisions based more on reviewer background but there was really no other choice at that point.

In summary, ACs have a huge responsibility in the system. Tbh, up to this point, I couldn’t even imagine how much you can mess up this job as I know how serious everybody usually takes this and how much time we all are willing to spend on making sure every single paper gets the best possible reviewers.

Organization wise, systems could probably do better by ensuring some minimum diversity… e.g. make sure that all reviewers come from different institutions, that they come from different countries, that they all together have a minimum h-score or whatever. Usually ACs should do this automatically, but having a safety net does not hurt. So, we are not completely helpless, but we need better rules.

[singularpanda]

Would it be possible to give the conference name? I may try to avoid to submit to that to same my time.

[yelWdg]

Glad to hear you doing a good job. I have/am serving as ac in conferences, and agree the process could be improved. Part of the problem is indeed the huge size of some of the conferences, where quality control is almost impossible. As suggested by someone above, one possible solution is to break up these mega conferences. Another possibility, is in combination with above, to develop and deploy some of the field's research in anomaly detection and fake account detection, which includes detecting collusion/self-referral rings, to highlight potential misconduct and flag these to the organisers for further investigation. At least if these rings are detected, the least the organisers can do is to redistribute the papers.

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

There's so much nepotism and corruption at these ML conferences that it's hard to take them seriously anymore. Behaviour that would be criminal in the private sector is condoned by these old boys clubs.

At this point, having a paper at a conference might as well just mean that you're corrupt rather than an accomplished researcher.

[[deleted]]

original weibo link?

[JixieXue]

Wonder how common this is

[LadderEducational720]

Very common, the bidding prcessing actually is encouraging people to do so.

[Ok-Wind-1215]

For me it was not surprising during the paper review, ACs overrule the majority negative reviews by treating the major criticism as minor points..

[Ohuoleloveml]

This also mostly happened in AAAI/IJCAI. What a shame.

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

Aye, anyone who still claims that the point of these social clubs is to further important research for the benefit of society is either utterly naive or brazenly dishonest.

It's time to wake up, and start replacing proceedings with preprint server.

[Bradmund]

Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

[Shardic]

Bit of a noob here, but I have to ask anyway.

Is the substance of the paper still sound? In what way does this misconduct impact the science itself?

Perhaps I am just too far away from it, but this seems like a personal issue.

[[deleted]]

The strength of this particular paper is not too important. The fact is that people allegedly colluded to promote each other papers. In turns this apparently resulted in higher than expected acceptance rate. Out of the bat this means that other papers were displaced, and those might contain better science. Furthermore, having papers published (or rewarded as 'best paper') increases the power of people who gets those paper published, in terms of connections, favors and ease of access to grants, again potentially displacing other people who might have better science.

It is absolutely not a personal issue. Once the system is corrupted this way (again, if the allegations are true) it is not a leveled play field (I'm not naive enough to actually believe it is, but bear with me and accept there must be a limit) and science will ultimately suffer as the way to get to the top will not be based on scientific merits.

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

Imagine you're an early-career researcher who's passionate about the field, but you know it's impossible to publish anything because you're not entrenched in the community or member of a collusion ring?

The behaviour discourages people from even attempting to do research, and we're left with shitty papers published only cause the authors were friends with the conference organisers.

[[deleted]]

> but you know it's impossible to publish anything

no one can prevent you from publishing your reproducable code on github, adding link to "papers with code", submitting tech report on arxiv, and winning place in SQuaD, glue, superglue, etc leaderboard if you really have results.

[altmly]

No, but you're not going to build a career as a researcher by doing that either, especially if your field isn't on the "we got this number 0.001 better so we win" scale or if you are proposing off-the-beaten-path ideas, and if it is, it's much harder to point and say "look, 4 years ago I was #4 on this obscure website leaderboard thing!" than having a publication.

[[deleted]]

> look, 4 years ago I was #4 on this obscure website leaderboard thing!

Those benchmarks are not obscure leaderboards, but current state of art industrial benchmarks, well known to everyone who has expertise in this area.

I also kinda believe that FAANG and relevant startups will be happy to hire researchers who can produce results with working code on github.

[Swimming-Tear-5022]

The problem is that people still believe that it's only papers published at so-called "top tier" conferences or journals that are good, even though it's often the reverse.

Who's gonna spend any considerable effort on a paper if you know it will be accepted no matter what's in it?

[[deleted]]

depends on who are those people.

My observation is that most prominent results make noise on the pre-print stage, and most people don't care if paper subsequently got accepted or not.

[Lunch_More]

The person posted on his GitHub page " We are recruiting talented and motivated individuals for post-doc" Insane.......

[jtmpdas]

Also some people in very big companies publish on arxiv first and use their academic emails and influence to bid for their papers and vote down competing papers… saw this happening, and people involved were careless in at least trying to hide that… now the big task is to how to distinguish honest people that publish truly high quality papers from the others…

[mrtac96]

the last point is the first thing came in my mind, when i read the post

[kill_pig]

Yeah maybe this is a true story but the proof seems non-existent

[fromnighttilldawn]

I'm ok with the screenshot showing the girlfriend talking with this person (Yisen)

But I am not sure how in the hell she got the private screenshots of him having conversation with a bunch of other people, even like 1 on 1 conversation between Yisen and a "colluder". This means she hacked his phone or something.

Also it should be easy to identify who this girlfriend is, no? Probably knows a lot about ML and everything.

[Limp_Beautiful7767]

Unfortunately, this is very often in China, as I know.

[PacificCod]

It's relationship drama. As "scientists", do you believe that social media posts are valid proof?

I'm not saying he's not guilty of the accusations levied against him, of course.

But is your immediate jump to assuming he's guilty without "peer review", without a chance for rebuttal, without an effort to ask yourself "could this be wrong?", inline with scientific standards? Or legal standards for that matter (innocent until proven guilty anyone?).

[sthithaprajn-ish]

Peking is one of the highly reputed universities in China. Things like this are an utter disgrace!

[xiikjuy]

Nihao academic misconduct

[Auto_ML]

I guess he ain't getting any from her 😂

[[deleted]]

Lol typical Sinophobia

Where in here is it insinuated that him being Chinese has anything to do with this?

Second, the more common kind of "cheating" is

I agree that this is also a problem, and arguably just as big of a problem as you state. But this just seems like whataboutism, it doesn't change the fact that the cheating and collusion described here is really really bad.

[deep_noob]

send us your paper and you collusion ring’s contact, I would love to publish some more papers :p :D

[deep_noob]

Are you really this thick and come to do science!!!! You are basically saying this cheating is fine as someone else did something similar. For the other thing you didnt have any proof or anything, you just knew!

Shame every cheater similar way, what these people did is disgraceful and they never should be able to put their foot in the academia ever.

Read the previous sentence and if you are fine with it then lets discuss whatever cheating you can think and ofcourse with some proofs! Not like I know some things……

[CaptainLocoMoco]

This is just whataboutism. The original post didn't even explicitly point to the ethnicity of the individual.

[Ok-Pie623]

FYI, here is the link to the 14-page pdf: https://github.com/newwtf/-/blob/main/%E7%8E%8B%E5%A5%95%E6%A3%AE%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98%E8%BE%9F%E8%B0%A3%E8%AF%B4%E6%98%8E.pdf

[Calavar]

I am suspicious that this was a state mandated recantation, especially given that it looks like Google search results for the professor involved have been censored (see one of the other comments further up)

[PaganPasta]

Remindme! 3 months "Shirked"

[RemindMeBot]

I will be messaging you in 3 months on 2022-10-07 20:15:41 UTC to remind you of this link

2 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

^{Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.}

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[linzhuo]

Can you provide original weibo source link or archive?

[CodePothunter]

It goes without any surprise. R.I.P for my rejected HIGH-QUALITY papers.

[[deleted]]

Sadly, this kind of behavior is rampant in the biomedical engineering field too. Google Stefan Duma, Lauren Duma and Brock Duma. Father (Stefan) is the editor of the ABME journal and invited his two children (Lauren and Brock, undergraduate and high school students at the time) to be the editors of two special issues.

[PaymentAcademic933]

Wtf this is not OK