Baidu team asked to Sit out of AI Contest for Rule Breach

Sidestepping the rules has cost a research team from Chinese search engine giant Baidu the international artificial intelligence competition. The team has now been told to sit out of the competition because of rule breach. Baidu was confident about beating Google and Microsoft in the competition, but the chance is not available anymore to the Chinese team.

The test was about the ability of recognizing images through computers. However, it has transpired that Baidu submitted far more tests than the rules allowed. As a result, it was not possible to compare Baidu’s results with others in the competition.

The firm has also admitted making the mistake and apologized for the same. Its win has now been cancelled and a ban has also been imposed on it to not participate in similar challenges for a year.

Baidu’s score was very impressive, with 4.58% error rate on a test that required contestants to actually recognize a series of images from a large picture database.

Baidu outsmarted Google and Microsoft – with 94% and 4.8% error rates respectively – but the victory was huge as Baidu is a rookie in AI. But things changed and went into a wrong direction for Baidu earlier this week as it was found guilty for rule breach, said organizers of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC).

“Recently the ILSVRC organizers contacted the Heterogeneous Computing team to inform us that we exceeded the allowable number of weekly submissions to the ImageNet servers", Ren Wu of the team said in a note included with the notice from contest organizers.