Announcing the NeurIPS 2024 Test of Time Paper Awards 

By Danielle Belgrave, Angela Fan, Ulrich Paquet, Jakub Tomczak, Cheng Zhang

We are honored to announce the Test of Time Paper Awards for NeurIPS 2024. This award is intended to recognize papers published 10 years ago at NeurIPS 2014 that have significantly shaped the research field since then, standing the test of time.

This year, we are making an exception to award two Test of Time papers given the undeniable influence of these two papers on the entire field. The awarded papers are:

• Generative Adversarial Nets
  Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio
  
• Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks
  Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le

The Generative Adversarial Nets paper has been cited more than 85,000 times as of this blog post. It is one of the foundational pieces for generative modeling and has inspired numerous research advances in the past 10 years. Besides research, it has also enabled generative modeling to make an impact in a diverse range of applications, considering vision data and other domains.

Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks has been cited more than 27,000 times as of this blog post. With the current fast advances of large language models and foundation models in general, making a paradigm shift in AI and applications, the field has benefited from the foundation laid by this work. It is the cornerstone work that set the encoder-decoder architecture, inspiring later attention-based improvements leading to today’s foundation model research.

There is no doubt regarding the significance of these two works.

At NeurIPS, you will see both papers presented by the authors in person, followed by a short Q&A on Friday, December 13th, 2024. We look forward to announcing other NeurIPS awards at the conference!