NIO executive Ren Shaoqing wins 2025 NeurIPS Test of Time Award (AI Oscar)

The 2025 NeurIPS Test of Time Award will recognize the 2015 Faster R-CNN paper led by Ren Xiaoqing, NIO Vice President and Autonomous Driving Principal Scientist, and will be awarded on December 4, 2025 in San Diego.

Ren is the first China-based research leader to receive this award, along with He Qiming, Ross Garshick and Sun Jian. This honor focuses on works that remain highly influential ten years after publication. NeurIPS is widely recognized as the leading global conference for artificial intelligence research and is considered the most prestigious and influential conference in the field for AI/ML. Some people describe this award as: oscar In the field of AI.

Published in 2015, Faster R-CNN has received more than 57,000 cumulative citations. This is the most cited NeurIPS paper written by Chinese researchers and one of the most cited works in the field of object detection. In this paper, a region proposal network was introduced that integrates multiple steps of a detection pipeline into a single trainable architecture. This design increases efficiency by more than 10x, reducing processing per image from seconds to milliseconds, enabling deployment in real-time environments.

The Test of Time Award has recently been presented to researchers such as Jeffrey Hinton (Nobel Prize in Physics), Joshua Bengio (Turing Award), Ilya Sutskeva (Co-founder of OpenAI), Ian Goodfellow, Oriol Viñals, and Greg Corrado. Many of these researchers helped establish core machine learning concepts that have shaped global AI development over the past decade.

The accelerated R-CNN influenced a wide range of subsequent systems, including Mask R-CNN and several generations of the YOLO family. Its impact extends to autonomous driving recognition, industrial quality control, medical imaging, security surveillance analysis, and satellite image interpretation. Over the past decade, its architecture has become one of the standard baselines for computer vision research and product-level engineering.

Mr. Ren holds positions as a senior executive at NIO and a chair professor at the University of Science and Technology of China. His recognition at NeurIPS comes as the China-based researcher grows his presence at major AI conferences. Following continued investment in basic science, the volume of publications and institutional representation has expanded to multiple research centers.

NeurIPS serves as a benchmark for global research trends and a place where fundamental methods frequently transition into industrial implementation. The Test of Time Award focuses on papers that demonstrate lasting technical impact and shape long-term development paths in artificial intelligence.

The 2025 award focuses on a decade of research that has transitioned from academic publication to widespread operations. Real-time perception continues to be a key element in both AI advances and mobility systems, and the long-term role of architecture-driven detection models raises questions about how perception methods may change as generative and multimodal systems evolve.