Recently, Tian Keyu has once again become the focus of attention due to a malicious attack incident during his internship at ByteDance. This Peking University intern won the Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2024 for a paper he participated in during his internship at ByteDance, which is also the sixth highest-scoring paper at NeurIPS 2024. The reversal of this situation has shocked netizens.
Tian Keyu's paper received the "Best Paper" award at NeurIPS 2024, making it the second paper from China to receive this honor this year. In addition, Tian has multiple top conference papers, including the Spotlight paper at ICLR 2023 titled "Designing BERT for Convolutional Networks: Sparse and Hierarchical Masked Modeling," as well as Poster awards at NeurIPS 2021 and 2020. However, compared to his academic achievements, Tian's malicious actions at ByteDance have garnered more attention.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, image licensed by Midjourney
Months ago, during his internship at ByteDance, Tian Keyu exploited a vulnerability in Huggingface to forge a checkpoint file containing malicious code. This altered the model training at ByteDance, as the attacker modified the model's parameters and training direction, leading to severe issues in model training. Tian initially denied any involvement, claiming the attack occurred after he left the company, but media reports indicate that ByteDance has filed a lawsuit against him. Ultimately, the court ordered Tian Keyu to compensate ByteDance 8 million yuan and to publicly apologize.
ByteDance clarified that despite the attack, it only affected research projects and did not impact the company's official commercialization projects. ByteDance subsequently terminated Tian Keyu and referred the matter to the educational institution. The company also emphasized that the team's losses would not affect the operation of other businesses.
Tian Keyu's actions have sparked discussions about intern management and corporate technology security. Although he has outstanding academic achievements and high-quality papers, his irrational behavior has brought about significant negative consequences. This incident has also raised concerns regarding the security measures of large companies and the management loopholes concerning interns. Many industry professionals believe that ByteDance's technology security and management still need to be strengthened to prevent similar incidents from occurring.