The 2025 NeurIPS Test of Time Award will be presented on December 4, 2025, in San Diego, recognizing the 2015 Faster R-CNN paper led by NIO Vice President and Chief Scientist for Autonomous Driving Ren Shaoqing.

Ren, together with Kaiming He, Ross Girshick, and Jian Sun, becomes the first China-based research lead to receive this award. The honor highlights work that has maintained significant influence ten years after publication. NeurIPS is widely regarded as the leading global conference for artificial-intelligence research and is often considered the field’s most prestigious and influential conference in AI/ML. Some even describes the award as the Oscars of the AI field.

Published in 2015, Faster R-CNN has accumulated more than 57,000 citations. It is the most cited NeurIPS paper authored by a Chinese researcher and one of the highest-cited studies in the object-detection domain. The paper introduced the region proposal network, which unified multiple steps of the detection pipeline into a single trainable architecture. The design improved efficiency by more than tenfold, reducing processing from seconds per image to milliseconds and enabling deployment in real-time environments.

The Test of Time Award has recently gone to researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel Prize in Physics), Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award), Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI co-founder), Ian Goodfellow, Oriol Vinyals, and Greg Corrado. Many of these researchers helped establish core machine-learning concepts that shaped the past decade of global AI development.

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

Ren holds positions as a senior executive at NIO and as a chaired professor at the University of Science and Technology of China. His recognition at NeurIPS comes as China-based researchers increase their presence in top AI conferences. Publication volumes and institutional representation have expanded across several research centers following sustained investment in fundamental science.

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

The 2025 award highlights a decade of work that has moved from academic publication to widespread operational use. Real-time perception continues to be a key factor in both AI advancement and mobility systems, and the long-term role of architecture-driven detection models raises questions about how perception methods may shift as generative and multimodal systems develop.