Announcing the Test of Time Paper Award for NeurIPS 2025

We are honored to announce the Test of Time Paper Awards for NeurIPS 2025. This award is intended to recognize papers that were published 10 years ago. For us this year that means looking at publications from NeurIPS 2015. that have significantly shaped the research field since then, standing the test of time.

This year, the awarded papers is:

Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks
Shaoqing Ren, Kaiming He, Ross Girshick, Jian Sun

The Faster R-CNN paper has been cited more than 56,700 times as of this blog post. It had deeply influenced the computer vision field, becoming a backbone for many follow-up works. The paper simultaneously achieved very good accuracy and near real-time detection of 5 FPs making neural models for object detection deployable in real world applications. This is the first work which replaced selective search and handcrafted proposals with a fully learnable two-stage pipeline including the region proposal network (RPN) and detection network. 

With the recognition of this work, we also want to express our condolences for the loss of Dr. Jian Sun. Dr. Sun left a significant print on the field. In the words of his co-authors: “Dr. Jian Sun was a pioneer and foundational figure in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in computer vision. His groundbreaking work has profoundly reshaped research paradigms in both industry and academia, driving the development and widespread adoption of AI technologies with enduring impact.”

At NeurIPS, you will see the paper being presented by the authors in person, followed by a short Q&A on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025. We look forward to announcing other NeurIPS awards at the conference!