Baidu Team Banned From AI Competition After Breaking Rules

Back in May, the Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) announced that one of the teams that were participating had circumvented the rules that allow only two evaluations of the test set per week. At the time the people running the challenge didn't announce which team had broken the rules. That has now changed with the ILSVRC team announcing that the team from Chinese firm Baidu has been banned from the competition.

According to the competition administrators during the period of November 28, 2014 through May 13, 2015 the team from Baidu used at least 30 accounts to submit to the test server at least 200 times. That is massively over the specified limit of two times per week.

The Baidu team was discovered to have made more than 40 submissions over five days spanning March 15 to March 19. Administrators of the challenge say that since the Baidu team violated the regulations having to do with the test server, its result may not be directly comparable to the result obtained by other teams.

By submitting to the test sever more frequently than allowed the team could have chosen similar solutions based on test performance for an advantage or chosen methods to research and develop based on test data rather than relying on training and validation of data. The Baidu team has been asked to not submit to the evaluation server or the challenge for the next 12 months.

SOURCE: Image-net.org