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[D] Lawsuit alleges fabricated results at Pinscreen led by Hao Li

The filing can be found here.
These are very serious allegations: generated models results were blatantly fabricated for academic papers as well as public demonstrations. In addition, there's some pretty awful allegations of worker abuse, including an attack on the plaintiff when they attempted to confront Li about the academic misconduct.
61 comments
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level 1
page 21, top screenshot:
anyways ... it's important that we know exactly who is using the webcam to generate the avatar
since we are just using pre-cached avatars
it's called SIGGRAPH "Real Time Live" not "Pre-Cached Live" ... this is bad
level 2
10 points · 1 month ago
I’m not familiar with their process but are we talking blatant fabrication here, or just “regress to a pre trained latent vector distribution” type stuff?
level 3
When I read it, it looked like the demo was supposed to do rendering on the spot fromnscratch. Sadegi himself tried it and observed it took a long time, and had issues (screenshot of his message is there). That's why they had faked it.
I didn't spend time to find the conference page (or the videos?) for it, that would be helpful.
level 4
6 points · 1 month ago · edited 1 month ago
I believe their presentation at SIGGRAPH 2017 RTL is here
level 1
anyone want to wager on whether this leads to other whistleblowers coming out about other ML & AI startups that are still faking it?
Is this just an isolated personality, or a symptom of competitive market?
level 2
Probably the tip of the iceberg. Lots of "AI" companies are just mechanical Turks under the guise that they're gathering training data.
level 3
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with it as long as (1) they're honest that humans are doing some of the stuff behind the scenes, (2) they're not misleading scientific conferences.
level 4
There is a saying in SV: fake it till you make it.
The problem is that if they would acknowledge that it's not gonna work, they wouldn't get more investments. At some point you're incentivized to keep the con going.
level 5
The Silicon Valley TV show addressed this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txl90NEl92U
level 5
But I think that there needs to be a line between creating the perception that you're really far along and outright fraud. For example if they presented demos and admitted (but perhaps in a way to not draw attention to it) that certain pieces are touched up by a human, they might still be able to build enthusiasm for their product, they could get around that issue without actually committing fraud.
This should also be a wakeup call to computer vision community to be better at preventing fraudulent demos.
level 2
I guess it's important to be more skeptical of academic claims, especially if there's a startup involved. Even if they come from someone at a respected institution.
level 1
Oh my god :( Sad sad behavior. Plus, I always suspected some people make academic literature forcibly hard..here is an example: Page 83 of the document, by Li "We need to make sure that people cannot easily implement it" "maybe we add a lot of things about the hair cutting etc." So much for reproducibility :(
level 2
They really don't, though, in general. One man's clear explanation is another man's "WTF is this shit?" Explaining things clearly is a skill, and not a skill that is widely distributed.
Also, people write for their peers, since that is going to be most of the audience for their paper.
level 3
This is true to some degree; technical writing is a skill that is usually not picked up naturally, and taught in a class thats ignored by most CS students (if taught at all) IME. It is, in my opinion, very hard. But as the person youre responding to quoted, what you are describing is not the case:
here is an example: Page 83 of the document, by Li "We need to make sure that people cannot easily implement it" "maybe we add a lot of things about the hair cutting etc."
level 4
Li is allegedly a crook, but the comment was speculating that this is the reason why technical papers are hard in general.
level 1
Now that reads extremely bad. If anything this kind of "fake it till you hopefully make it" is really a big issue for research in such a competitive corporate setting.
level 1
I was going to highlight stuff like
[April 18, 2017] Li: “We need to make sure that people cannot easily implement it”
and
[June 21, 2017] Li: “What I mean is that it’s not easy to tell how to tweak data to get the results we want”
but then I found this, which is even worse IMHO
[February 4, 2017] Li: “One of our tasks is to map segmented hair images to 3D hairstyles
[February 4, 2017] Li: “Here is a paper that is kinda related”
[February 4, 2017] Li: “But not exactly what we want”
[February 4, 2017] Li: “Don’t share it”
[February 4, 2017] […]
[February 4, 2017] Li: [c118-f118_2-a523-paper-v1.pdf]
[March 3, 2017] Li: “Don’t share this paper”
[March 3, 2017] Li: “It’s under review”
This is ... bad ... so weird because this guy seemed like a respectable academic.
level 2
9 points · 1 month ago · edited 1 month ago
Isn't it normal to ask that a prepublication draft not be leaked until it has been accepted?
EDIT: Ooops. I misunderstood the messages exchanged. Thanks to /u/netw0rkf10w for setting me straight.
level 3
You don’t get it.
« Li’s academic misconduct included sharing confidential under-review scientific paper submissions from competitor research groups within Pinscreen and suggesting to look for “details that can be used.” »
He was either a reviewer or an area chair and was sharing a paper under submission from another group/competitor with his team (and asked them to not share it).
level 4
You are absolutely correct. I misread the message exchange and thought it was his own paper.
I should have read through to page 18.
level 3
I guess it depends whether it was his or not?
level 1
It seems that some people didn’t read the PDF before commenting. Maybe it’s too long. So here’s the link to a visual TL;DR: http://sadeghi.com/dr-iman-sadeghi-v-pinscreen-inc-et-al/#visualtldr
level 2
6 points · 1 month ago
This literally cannot get more SIGGRAPH.
level 3
3 points · 1 month ago
Peer reviews used as evidence! This is so exciting.
level 1
15 points · 1 month ago
Not familiar with the situation. Could anyone give a summary of the events?
level 2
Established Professor and CEO of startup fakes his results to bring in fame and fortune until employee calls him out on it.
level 3
Hao Li Shit!
level 3
3 points · 1 month ago
Thanks
level 2
9 points · 1 month ago
It seems they wrongfully terminated & assaulted the employee when he exposed them, hence the lawsuit :/
level 3
From what I read, he hadn’t exposed them until he was assaulted. He was just convincing them to stop cheating.
level 1
Pinscreen damaged Sadeghi’s personal property remaining at Sadeghi’s desk at Pinscreen’s office. In storing it negligently, Pinscreen broke Sadeghi’s handmade sculpture, which has sentimental value
Okay now I want to know what his sculpture is.
level 1
Really sad, I took this Prof Li's graphics class last year. He seemed like a fine person ethically. :(
level 2
Oh boy! Do you have surprises in your future. :( Sorry.
Most people are believed, respected, revered, and/or financially rewarded based on the strength of their reputations, which leads to some folks wanting to maintaining these reputations at all costs. People rationalize the "end justifies the mean" mentality, and many times get away with it, which only reinforces these behaviors.
level 2
oh sweet summer child
level 2
That's because he IS a fine and ethical person. You're an academic - research the facts.
level 1
16 points · 1 month ago · edited 1 month ago
:O
I follow and admire Hao Li work so these news have left me speechless. Deeply disappointed.
level 1
8 points · 1 month ago · edited 1 month ago
Here's the SIGGRAPH 2017 RTL demo in question
level 3
Hi, I'm a bot for linking direct images of albums with only 1 image
level 1
One part I don't understand though is if/how Sadeghi hopes to come out cleanly from this. He was on the stage of SIGGRAPH presenting the allegedly fake hair reconstruction. He may have felt a conflict doing it, and now regrets it, but that did not stop him from being the man giving credibility to the whole thing due to his hair work. If he really wanted to do the right thing, why not stopping things before they happened? And if he was ok with it at the time, buying into the "fake it until you make it" philosophy, what's the real reason for turning against the company later on? That he was eventually fired? Or was he worried that somone would expose pinscreen and jumped off the boat before too late?
level 2
Yeah, why indeed. Because Pinscreen's / Hao's work is not fake. And it's obvious if you check it out. Iman Sadeghi got fired and is now out for blood. Check out Petrenuk's comment.
level 1
Wow. So this company must be completely fucked now right? How does a person like Li even come to exist?
level 2
I mean, is it really surprising even a little bit?
The competition is so fierce, and it's essentially a winner takes all game. Even if your algorithm/implementation is really really good, if there's someone marginally better than yours, they'll get a keynote speech, while you'll just be a footnote.
level 3
-5 points · 1 month ago(0 children)
level 2
I'm curious what would happen, since their app is now actually able to do the avatar generation in "seconds", albeit after the faked RTL demo.
level 3
Is it? I haven't looked at the app lately -- is it able to actually do the real time rendering that they were faking? I guess that would change things a little, but there's still some pretty wild behavior in these allegations.
level 1
[deleted]
3 points · 1 month ago
Looking at how his bio is written http://www.hao-li.com I am a little surprised that he is an assistant professor at USC.
level 1
Hi everyone! I could not just stand by, I know Pinscreen because at the time I worked for the competing company and we also did automatic 3D avatars.
I don't really believe in these allegations, we usually tried all the Pinscreen apps and demos the first day they came out (because, obviously, we were interested in our competitor's tech). They worked pretty much as advertised. I generated a few avatars myself, and they turned out alright, including the skin texture, hair and animation. Their pipeline is based on machine learning so like every learned solution it is definitely possible to break. But it was certainly good enough for demos, entertainment apps etc.
I've heard they are coming up with some new amazing tech soon, just look at the SIGGRAPH 2018 teaser https://youtu.be/nj-3ipY4u58?t=25
A well known AI researcher Ian Goodfellow also posted about this recently: https://twitter.com/goodfellow_ian/status/1026904656117678080
If you don't believe a modern day AI can solve problems like this, just download one of their apps and try yourself. It's very difficult to do, but it's definitely possible!
So not every bad thing said on the internet is true. I'm pretty sure this one is fake news, apparently some guy got fired and was really upset about this to start this lawsuit.
level 1
The evidence alledging fraud as well as labor law violations, seems damning. Oof.
However, after reading through the alleged events, I'm not sure that the claims of battery and false imprisomment amount to quite that, presuming what's there is true to the word. Was he not harboring property that was not his, being the laptop? Since when do employees have rights to 'remove personal data' from company hardware, and return it at their convenience?
level 2
8 points · 1 month ago · edited 1 month ago
Pinscreen's Dr Hi had every right to demand the immediate return of all of Pinscreen's property upon terminating Dr Sadeghi. They could have asked the assistance of the office building's physical security to obtain this. Just the presence, outside the conference room, of a security guard is enough to keep things smooth. It's standard procedure recommended by HR consultants.
Instead, Dr Hi allegedly lost his temper, assaulted Dr Sadeghi physically and verbally (hence the battery complaint) then ordered Pinscreen employees to tackle Dr Sadeghi and hold him down (hence the false imprisonment complaint). I can't understand either how those employees complied, if this were a normal office environment. How does this compare to the above procedure ?
The CFO advising Dr Hi to stop at the time was probably hearing the ka-ching! of liability.
With the alleged video recording supporting this, this should be settled by Pinscreen out of court in no time.
level 3
4 points · 1 month ago · edited 1 month ago
There's no question thay Hi's actions did not approximate what I think any office considers SOP for firing an employee.
To one of your points, and after reading some on what legally constitutes 'assualt', it seems the claim will stick. Excuse the ignorance on my.part.
I guess what irked me was the mention in the filing that Sadeghi intended to return the laptop a later time, after removing ..whatever. As if that's okay. But, obviously, Hi's own (alleged) actions don't even compare, especially as the authority/managerial figure, being wholly disproportionate, childish, perhaps even criminal,
level 1
1 point · 28 days ago
If the allegations are true, a civil lawsuit holds no meaning in academic settings, partly because the parties usually settle outside court without disclosing the settling terms. As far as holding Prof Li accountable for academic misconduct is concerned, there are two things that should be done: 1. file a complaint with IEEE, where the alleged cheating paper was sent, for possible misconduct, 2. file a complaint with USC's academic committee, where the Prof Li is associated with.
level 2
1 point · 28 days ago
A complaint to USC could be further complicated by the allegation of mistreating students. The students have a person interest of completing their PhD degree, which strongly depends on their advising professor. In case they lose their advising professor, they will 1. "lose" the time they spend under the advising professor 2. lose their source of income 3. must find another professor or lose the ability to continue research and possibly lose their visa to stay in the US. In this situation, they may overturn their previous complaints against the professor, which weren't recorded in a reliable source and were taken without their knowledge.
level 2
1 point · 28 days ago · edited 28 days ago
On the other hand, without knowing either parties in real life or their intentions, a skeptic might believe the bad press and the settlement is what the suer looked for, giving the suer the maximum leverage on financial gain, without stepping over the other party's bottom line.
level 1
1 point · 13 days ago
Was this the presentation from the lawsuit's page 2?
level 1
Words are easier to fabricate than the results. If you don't believe Pinscreen, just look at the amazing progress they have made: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/a-i-at-siggraph-part-2-pinscreen-at-real-time-live/
level 1
There is a twitter post from Ian Goodfellow (father of GANs). According to his connections, these allegations are false: r/https://twitter.com/goodfellow_ian/status/1026904656117678080
level 1
You do realize you can verify Pinscreen's work yourself. I hope you all do your own due diligence rather than lazily relying on the rantings of this stalker Iman Sadeghi. This guy is a violent, disgruntled ex-employee of Pinscreen, out for vengeance. It's pathetic and sad.
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